sorry for the basic questions: I'm going through the tutorials for magic here http://opencircuitdesign.com/magic/index.html and finding that things don't always work, like ^D and pressing s with the cursor over an object with no box, and t for move (which prints a message "Unknown macro or short command: 'XK_t'" in tutorial 2. Is that normal for recent versions of magic?

Yes, there are some discrepancies between the documentation and the current set of macros that is distributed with magic. There is a compile-time option for using the "old style" macros that would correspond exactly to the tutorials. Every now and then I think about updating the tutorials properly, but it's a huge task, and the existing tutorials were converted from LaTeX to HTML which makes them a pain to edit.