12.11.1 Marking the region

First of all, you need to mark a region of text in the current buffer which you want to transfer into the kill ring. There are two ways that you can do this:

• Select the text you want to copy or cut using the mouse. Click and hold down the Select mouse button, and drag the pointer across the region you want to mark.

The selected text is highlighted using the Region Highlight text style.

• Using keyboard commands

To mark the region with the keyboard, place the cursor at the beginning of the text you want to mark, press Ctrl+Space , and move the cursor to the end of the region you want to mark, using keyboard commands to do so . Unlike marking with the mouse, this does not highlight the region.

Because the Editor does not highlight the marked region when you use keyboard commands, a useful EMACS key to remember is Ctrl+X Ctrl+X . Pressing this exchanges the current cursor position with the start of the marked region and highlights the region. Press Ctrl+X Ctrl+X a second time to return the cursor to its original position and leave the region marked.

Press Ctrl+G (or Esc in Mac OS editor emulation) to remove the highlighting in a region.