8 Cutting and Storing Text

Whenever you cut or clip text out of a buffer with a ‘kill’ command in GNU Emacs, it is stored in a list and you can bring it back with a ‘yank’ command.

(The use of the word ‘kill’ in Emacs for processes which specifically do not destroy the values of the entities is an unfortunate historical accident. A much more appropriate word would be ‘clip’ since that is what the kill commands do; they clip text out of a buffer and put it into storage from which it can be brought back. I have often been tempted to replace globally all occurrences of ‘kill’ in the Emacs sources with ‘clip’ and all occurrences of ‘killed’ with ‘clipped’.)