9.4 Moving Text

The most common way to move or copy text in Emacs is through killing or ‘cutting’ it and then yanking or ‘pasting’ it. You can also use the Cut or Copy option from the Edit menu for killing and copying respectively. See Edit menu, for reviewing the commands for killing text. All the killed text in Emacs is recorded in the kill ring. Since there is only one kill ring in Emacs, you can kill text in one buffer and yank it in another buffer. To ‘paste’ or ‘yank’ the killed text you can use the following commands:

C-y

This command will yank or paste the last killed text (yank).

M-w

Save region as last killed text without actually killing it (copy-region-as-kill). You can use this command to copy a selected region and then yank (or paste) it without actually removing it from the buffer.

C-M-w

Append next kill to last batch of killed text (append-next-kill). This command will append whatever you killed last to what you kill now. Then later you will be able to yank the entire appended text from the kill ring.