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Whenever you cut text out of a buffer with a `kill' command in GNU Emacs, you can bring it back with a `yank' command. The text that is cut out of the buffer is put in the kill ring and the yank commands insert the appropriate contents of the kill ring back into a buffer (not necessarily the original buffer).
A simple C-y (yank
) command inserts the first item from
the kill ring into the current buffer. If the C-y command is
followed immediately by M-y, the first element is replaced by
the second element. Successive M-y commands replace the second
element with the third, fourth, or fifth element, and so on. When the
last element in the kill ring is reached, it is replaced by the first
element and the cycle is repeated. (Thus the kill ring is called a
`ring' rather than just a `list'. However, the actual data structure
that holds the text is a list.
See section Handling the Kill Ring, for the details of how the
list is handled as a ring.)
10.1 Kill Ring Overview | The kill ring is a list. | |
10.2 The kill-ring-yank-pointer Variable | The kill-ring-yank-pointer variable. | |
10.3 Exercises with yank and nthcdr |
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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)) |
To begin to understand how yank
and yank-pop
work, it is
first necessary to look at the kill-ring-yank-pointer
variable
and the rotate-yank-pointer
function.
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kill-ring-yank-pointer
Variable
kill-ring-yank-pointer
is a variable, just as kill-ring
is
a variable. It points to something by being bound to the value of what
it points to, like any other Lisp variable.
Thus, if the value of the kill ring is:
("some text" "a different piece of text" "yet more text") |
and the kill-ring-yank-pointer
points to the second clause, the
value of kill-ring-yank-pointer
is:
("a different piece of text" "yet more text") |
As explained in the previous chapter (see section 9. How Lists are Implemented), the
computer does not keep two different copies of the text being pointed to
by both the kill-ring
and the kill-ring-yank-pointer
. The
words "a different piece of text" and "yet more text" are not
duplicated. Instead, the two Lisp variables point to the same pieces of
text. Here is a diagram:
kill-ring kill-ring-yank-pointer | | | ___ ___ | ___ ___ ___ ___ ---> | | | --> | | | | | | |___|___|----> |___|___|--> |___|___|--> nil | | | | | | | | --> "yet more text" | | | --> "a different piece of text | --> "some text" |
Both the variable kill-ring
and the variable
kill-ring-yank-pointer
are pointers. But the kill ring itself is
usually described as if it were actually what it is composed of. The
kill-ring
is spoken of as if it were the list rather than that it
points to the list. Conversely, the kill-ring-yank-pointer
is
spoken of as pointing to a list.
These two ways of talking about the same thing sound confusing at first but
make sense on reflection. The kill ring is generally thought of as the
complete structure of data that holds the information of what has recently
been cut out of the Emacs buffers. The kill-ring-yank-pointer
on the other hand, serves to indicate--that is, to `point to'---that part
of the kill ring of which the first element (the CAR) will be
inserted.
The rotate-yank-pointer
function changes the element in the
kill ring to which the kill-ring-yank-pointer
points; when the
pointer is set to point to the next element beyond the end of the kill
ring, it automatically sets it to point to the first element of the
kill ring. This is how the list is transformed into a ring. The
rotate-yank-pointer
function itself is not difficult, but
contains many details. It and the much simpler yank
and
yank-pop
functions are described in an appendix.
See section Handling the Kill Ring.
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yank
and nthcdr
describe-variable
), look at the value of
your kill ring. Add several items to your kill ring; look at its
value again. Using M-y (yank-pop)
, move all the way
around the kill ring. How many items were in your kill ring? Find
the value of kill-ring-max
. Was your kill ring full, or could
you have kept more blocks of text within it?
nthcdr
and car
, construct a series of expressions
to return the first, second, third, and fourth elements of a list.
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