italics in emacs

Personally, I use it AUCTeXin TeX/LaTeX editing emacs. There are lots of good tutorials on how to use it, e.g. A Simple Guide to a (…) TeX Workflow Using emacs or Emacs as the Ultimate LaTeX Editor . To answer your question: yes, it is possible and provides the following tools:AUCTeX

The relevant section in the manual is " Changing the Font" , taken from the manual:

AUCTeX provides convenient keyboard shortcuts for inserting macros that specify the font used to typeset certain parts of the text. They start with Cc Cf and the C-combination at the end tells AUCTeX which font you want:

[...]

 C-c C-f C-i

    Insert italics ‘\textit{∗}’ text.

If the command is executed with the active region, it will put that region into the arguments of the formatting command. If there is no area, the formatting command will be inserted and you will enter what you want.

By combining it with packages such as or you can change the format of words to stepsexpand-regionthing-cmds

1. use expand-region/ mark wordsmark-thing
2. FormatAUCTeX

It is possible to combine these two steps into a "set it and forget it" function (eg TeX-italicise-word, but I strongly advise against doing so, because (I think) emacsthe "real power" comes from composing the function/action.

If you're really stuck with a one-key solution, I recommend reading up on keyboard macros , which can be used to interactively create compound commands.