eintr: See variable current value
Seeing the Current Value of a Variable
--------------------------------------
You can see the current value of a variable, any variable, by using the
‘describe-variable’ function, which is usually invoked by typing ‘C-h
v’. If you type ‘C-h v’ and then ‘kill-ring’ (followed by <RET>) when
prompted, you will see what is in your current kill ring—this may be
quite a lot! Conversely, if you have been doing nothing this Emacs
session except read this document, you may have nothing in it. Also,
you will see the documentation for ‘kill-ring’:
Documentation:
List of killed text sequences.
Since the kill ring is supposed to interact nicely with cut-and-paste
facilities offered by window systems, use of this variable should
interact nicely with `interprogram-cut-function' and
`interprogram-paste-function'. The functions `kill-new',
`kill-append', and `current-kill' are supposed to implement this
interaction; you may want to use them instead of manipulating the kill
ring directly.
The kill ring is defined by a ‘defvar’ in the following way:
(defvar kill-ring nil
"List of killed text sequences.
...")
In this variable definition, the variable is given an initial value of
‘nil’, which makes sense, since if you have saved nothing, you want
nothing back if you give a ‘yank’ command. The documentation string is
written just like the documentation string of a ‘defun’. As with the
documentation string of the ‘defun’, the first line of the documentation
should be a complete sentence, since some commands, like ‘apropos’,
print only the first line of documentation. Succeeding lines should not
be indented; otherwise they look odd when you use ‘C-h v’
(‘describe-variable’).
Info Catalog
eintr: defvar
eintr: defvar and asterisk