18.2 Saving Text in Registers

When you want to insert a copy of the same piece of text several times, it may be inconvenient to yank it from the kill ring, since each subsequent kill moves that entry further down the ring. An alternative is to store the text in a register and later retrieve it.

C-x r s r

Copy region into register r (copy-to-register).

C-x r i r

Insert text from register r (insert-register).

M-x append-to-register <RET> r

Append region to text in register r.

M-x prepend-to-register <RET> r

Prepend region to text in register r.

C-x r s r stores a copy of the text of the region into the register named r. C-u C-x r s r, the same command with a numeric argument, deletes the text from the buffer as well; you can think of this as “moving” the region text into the register.

M-x append-to-register <RET> r appends the copy of the text in the region to the text already stored in the register named r. If invoked with a numeric argument, it deletes the region after appending it to the register. The command prepend-to-register is similar, except that it prepends the region text to the text in the register, rather than appending it.

C-x r i r inserts in the buffer the text from register r. Normally it leaves point before the text and places the mark after, but with a numeric argument (C-u) it puts point after the text and the mark before.