Can I keep the same item for yanks in Emacs?

Question

Something I do often in Emacs is to cut a bit of text, and then replace another bit with the cut text. So, say I've got the text I want to yank as the last item in my kill-ring. I yank it into the new place, then kill the text that was already there. But now the killed text is the latest item in the kill-ring. So next time I want to yank the first item, I have to do C-y M-y. Then the next time there are two more recent items in the kill-ring, so I have to do C-y M-y M-y, and so on.

I'm guessing there's a better way to do this. Can someone enlighten me please?

Answer 1

You should use delete-region instead of kill-region.

delete-region deletes the region without putting it in the kill ring. It is bind to <menu-bar> <edit> <clear> by default.

If you only want to use default bindings without using the menu, you could use delete-rectangle with C-x r d but it works on rectangle. It could be fine to use it on a single line like delete-region.

Answer 2

I wrote this function to pop the newest item off the kill-ring:

(defun my-kill-ring-pop ()
  "Pop the last kill off the ring."
  (interactive)
  (when kill-ring
    (setq kill-ring (cdr kill-ring)))
  (when kill-ring-yank-pointer
    (setq kill-ring-yank-pointer kill-ring))
  (message "Last kill popped off kill-ring."))

So after I kill something I don't want to keep, I hit a key that calls this.

Answer 3

Several alternatives:

1. Turn on delete-selection-mode, and use C-d or delete to delete region without touching the kill-ring.
2. Use C-x r s i to save text to register i, and later, C-x r i i to insert the saved text.
3. If the pattern of texts to be replaced can be captured in a regular expression, use query-replace-regexp (C-M-%).