Comment by BMarkmann

10 years ago

Emacs kill ring?

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ki...

It takes a while to get used to it, but once you understand it / use it in anger, it becomes tough to live without.

19 comments

BMarkmann

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smacktoward  10 years ago

Only in unix-world would it be considered wise to call the place where you put blocks of text for later use the "kill ring."

  • klibertp  10 years ago

    Nothing to do with Unix, it's an Emacs thing.

    In Emacs, what you nowadays call "cutting and pasting" is instead called "killing and yanking". It was called that way even before "cut" and "paste" got popularized, I think.

    And the "Kill Ring" name makes sense, as it a) contains snippets of text you killed and b) when yanking (pasting) lets you cycle through all the killed snippets. You can view your kill ring in its entirety via a menu or with a plugin (kill-ring-browser or similar, I forget).

    Emacs is old and brittle, but its basic editing model is very good. It does lack (without plugins) some features I learned in Vim (the most irritating thing at the beginning was a lack of "textobjects"; I still occasionally miss them, despite expand-region and other plugins), but is basically the only editor that I feel is worth learning.

    • Avshalom  10 years ago

      >>In Emacs, what you nowadays call "cutting and pasting" is instead called "killing and yanking". It was called that way even before "cut" and "paste" got popularized, I think

      Cut and paste refer to literal scissors/knives and glue/paste it predates the Gutenberg press.

      5 replies →

    • smacktoward  10 years ago

      > Nothing to do with Unix, it's an Emacs thing.

      Yes, I know that. It was a joke that used the specific example of Emacs to illustrate a point about how tone-deaf Unix developers can be about UI issues.

      > In Emacs, what you nowadays call "cutting and pasting" is instead called "killing and yanking". It was called that way even before "cut" and "paste" got popularized, I think.

      Sure, but it's been pretty much universally referred to as "cutting and pasting" everywhere for what, two decades now? The Emacs terminology is a wart, a relic of a bygone age. There's no reason to continue using it, except inertia.

      > And the "Kill Ring" name makes sense, as it a) contains snippets of text you killed

      This only makes sense if you accept that there is a reason to continue referring to that interaction as "killing" rather than "cutting", which (as is probably clear from the above) I do not. The world has settled on a set of terms to describe these interactions, persisting in using ancient ones just because they're what have always been used just makes Emacs harder to learn that it should be.

      (Which may of course be the whole point; surrounding common interactions with unusual terminology is a good way for people who already know Emacs to state to outsiders that they are keepers of arcane knowledge beyond the common ken of man. But social signaling is a shabby motivation for user interface decisions.)

      8 replies →

    • gcr  10 years ago

      Modern emacs isn't old or brittle anymore. Heck, we even have text antialiasing now for users with graphical displays! :-)