20.3 Using Other Windows

C-x o

Select another window (other-window).

C-M-v

Scroll the next window upward (scroll-other-window).

C-M-S-v

Scroll the next window downward (scroll-other-window-down).

mouse-1

mouse-1, in the text area of a window, selects the window and moves point to the position clicked. Clicking in the mode line selects the window without moving point in it.

With the keyboard, you can switch windows by typing C-x o (other-window). That is an o, for “other", not a zero. When there are more than two windows, this command moves through all the windows in a cyclic order, generally top to bottom and left to right. After the rightmost and bottommost window, it goes back to the one at the upper left corner. A numeric argument means to move several steps in the cyclic order of windows. A negative argument moves around the cycle in the opposite order. When the minibuffer is active, the minibuffer window is the last window in the cycle; you can switch from the minibuffer window to one of the other windows, and later switch back and finish supplying the minibuffer argument that is requested. See Minibuffer Edit.

The other-window command will normally only switch to the next window in the current frame (unless otherwise configured). If you work in a multi-frame environment and you want windows in all frames to be part of the cycle, you can rebind C-x o to the next-window-any-frame command. (See Rebinding, for how to rebind a command.)

The usual scrolling commands (see Display) apply to the selected window only, but there are also commands to scroll the next window. C-M-v (scroll-other-window) scrolls the window that C-x o would select. In other respects, the command behaves like C-v; both move the buffer text upward relative to the window, and take positive and negative arguments. (In the minibuffer, C-M-v scrolls the help window associated with the minibuffer, if any, rather than the next window in the standard cyclic order; see Minibuffer Edit.) C-M-S-v (scroll-other-window-down) scrolls the next window downward in a similar way.

If you set mouse-autoselect-window to a non-nil value, moving the mouse over a different window selects that window. This feature is off by default.