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12.11.3 Pasting text

Once you have an item in the kill ring, you can paste it back into a buffer as many times as you like.

With many editors you can only do this with one item at a time. The clipboard is only able to contain one item, and so it is the only one available for pasting back into the text.

However, the kill ring allows you to keep many items. Any of these items can be pasted back into your document at any time. Every time you cut or copy something, it is added to the kill ring, so you accumulate more items in the kill ring as your session progresses.

Consider the following example. In Kill ring with three items, the kill ring contains three items; the words factorial , function and macro respectively.

Figure 12.17 Kill ring with three items

First, the word factorial was cut from the current buffer (this would remove it from the buffer). Next, the word function was copied (which would leave it in the buffer but add a copy of it to the kill ring), and lastly, the word macro was cut.

Note the concept of the kill ring rotating (this is why it is known as a ring). Every time a new item is added (at the top, in these figures), the others are all shunted around in a counter-clockwise direction.

Whenever you perform a paste, the current item in the kill ring--the word macro in this case--is copied back into the buffer wherever the cursor currently is. Note that the current item is not removed from the kill ring.

Figure 12.18 Pasting from the kill ring

What you have seen so far does exactly the same thing as the standard clipboard. True, all three items have been kept in the kill ring, but they are of no use if you cannot actually get at them.

The EMACS key to do this is Alt+Y or Esc Y . This rotates the kill ring in the opposite direction--thus making the previous item the current one--and pastes it into the buffer in place of the item just pasted. In Pasting from the kill ring, the word macro would be replaced with the word function .

You can use Alt+Y as many times as you like. For instance, if you actually wanted to paste the word factorial in the document, pressing Alt+Y would replace the word function with the word factorial .

Figure 12.19 Rotating the kill ring

If you pressed Alt+Y a third time, the kill ring would have rotated completely, and macro would have been the current item once again.

Note: You can never use Alt+Y without having used Ctrl+Y immediately beforehand.

Here is a summary of the way Ctrl+Y and Alt+Y work:


Common LispWorks User Guide (Windows version) - 5 Jul 2006

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