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(emacs)Earlier Kills

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Yanking Earlier Kills
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   To recover killed text that is no longer the most recent kill, use
the `M-y' command (`yank-pop').  It takes the text previously yanked
and replaces it with the text from an earlier kill.  So, to recover the
text of the next-to-the-last kill, first use `C-y' to yank the last
kill, and then use `M-y' to replace it with the previous kill.  `M-y'
is allowed only after a `C-y' or another `M-y'.

   You can understand `M-y' in terms of a "last yank" pointer which
points at an entry in the kill ring.  Each time you kill, the "last
yank" pointer moves to the newly made entry at the front of the ring.
`C-y' yanks the entry which the "last yank" pointer points to.  `M-y'
moves the "last yank" pointer to a different entry, and the text in the
buffer changes to match.  Enough `M-y' commands can move the pointer to
any entry in the ring, so you can get any entry into the buffer.
Eventually the pointer reaches the end of the ring; the next `M-y'
loops back around to the first entry again.

   `M-y' moves the "last yank" pointer around the ring, but it does not
change the order of the entries in the ring, which always runs from the
most recent kill at the front to the oldest one still remembered.

   `M-y' can take a numeric argument, which tells it how many entries
to advance the "last yank" pointer by.  A negative argument moves the
pointer toward the front of the ring; from the front of the ring, it
moves "around" to the last entry and continues forward from there.

   Once the text you are looking for is brought into the buffer, you can
stop doing `M-y' commands and it will stay there.  It's just a copy of
the kill ring entry, so editing it in the buffer does not change what's
in the ring.  As long as no new killing is done, the "last yank"
pointer remains at the same place in the kill ring, so repeating `C-y'
will yank another copy of the same previous kill.

   If you know how many `M-y' commands it would take to find the text
you want, you can yank that text in one step using `C-y' with a numeric
argument.  `C-y' with an argument restores the text from the specified
kill ring entry, counting back from the most recent as 1.  Thus, `C-u 2
C-y' gets the next-to-the-last block of killed text--it is equivalent
to `C-y M-y'.  `C-y' with a numeric argument starts counting from the
"last yank" pointer, and sets the "last yank" pointer to the entry that
it yanks.

   The length of the kill ring is controlled by the variable
`kill-ring-max'; no more than that many blocks of killed text are saved.

   The actual contents of the kill ring are stored in a variable named
`kill-ring'; you can view the entire contents of the kill ring with the
command `C-h v kill-ring'.