Scrolling the screen vertically

[Valera Rozuvan <valera.rozuvan@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

While horizontal scrolling of a screen is easy with the default key
combos C-v and M-v, most times I run into the problem of quickly
scrolling sideways. This is a problem for me because I use

(setq truncate-lines t)

in my ~/.emacs

There is the C-a to go to the beginning of the line, and also the C-e
to go to the end of the line. But if the line is very long, I would
like fine-grained control - to scroll by the screen's width with an
overlap of a few characters. Currently I use M-f and M-b to go right
or left by words (this is faster then just using the right and left
keys on the keyboard to move by a single character), but this method
is still slow.

Ideally I would like to write some key combo which lets me peek on any
off-screen text (lines that are longer than the screen's width), and
then go back to the location of the cursor (ideally the cursor
shouldn't move). Is it possible to shift the "view-port" (don't know
how to properly call it) 50 characters left or right?

Any input on this problem will be appreciated.

Regards,
Valera Rozuvan