There is some disagreement whether the action moves with the key labelled "X" or stays in the lower-left location on keyboards with different letter arrangements.
[2] The key combination was one of a handful of keyboard sequences chosen by the program designers at Xerox PARC to control text editing.
Direct manipulation is a term introduced by Ben Shneiderman in 1982 within the context of office applications and the desktop metaphor.
[3][4] Indirect manipulation has a higher level of abstraction compared to direct manipulation, because first one must select the item (such as character, word, paragraph or icon) that one wants to edit and then give the command as a second step.
Emacs uses it as the first keystroke in a number of two-keystroke commands, for instance Ctrl+XS saves the current file.