eintr: Kill Ring Overview
10.1 Kill Ring Overview
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The kill ring is a list of textual strings. This is what it looks like:
("some text" "a different piece of text" "yet more text")
If this were the contents of my kill ring and I pressed ‘C-y’, the
string of characters saying ‘some text’ would be inserted in this buffer
where my cursor is located.
The ‘yank’ command is also used for duplicating text by copying it.
The copied text is not cut from the buffer, but a copy of it is put on
the kill ring and is inserted by yanking it back.
Three functions are used for bringing text back from the kill ring:
‘yank’, which is usually bound to ‘C-y’; ‘yank-pop’, which is usually
bound to ‘M-y’; and ‘rotate-yank-pointer’, which is used by the two
other functions.
These functions refer to the kill ring through a variable called the
‘kill-ring-yank-pointer’. Indeed, the insertion code for both the
‘yank’ and ‘yank-pop’ functions is:
(insert (car kill-ring-yank-pointer))
(Well, no more. In GNU Emacs 22, the function has been replaced by
‘insert-for-yank’ which calls ‘insert-for-yank-1’ repetitively for each
‘yank-handler’ segment. In turn, ‘insert-for-yank-1’ strips text
properties from the inserted text according to
‘yank-excluded-properties’. Otherwise, it is just like ‘insert’. We
will stick with plain ‘insert’ since it is easier to understand.)
To begin to understand how ‘yank’ and ‘yank-pop’ work, it is first
necessary to look at the ‘kill-ring-yank-pointer’ variable.
Info Catalog
eintr: Yanking
eintr: kill-ring-yank-pointer