12.1.3 Other Kill Commands

C-w

Kill the region (kill-region).

M-w

Copy the region into the kill ring (kill-ring-save).

M-d

Kill the next word (kill-word). See Words.

M-<DEL>

Kill one word backwards (backward-kill-word).

C-x <DEL>

Kill back to beginning of sentence (backward-kill-sentence). See Sentences.

M-k

Kill to the end of the sentence (kill-sentence).

C-M-k

Kill the following balanced expression (kill-sexp). See Expressions.

M-z char

Kill through the next occurrence of char (zap-to-char).

One of the commonly-used kill commands is C-w (kill-region), which kills the text in the region (see Mark). Similarly, M-w (kill-ring-save) copies the text in the region into the kill ring without removing it from the buffer. If the mark is inactive when you type C-w or M-w, the command acts on the text between point and where you last set the mark (see Using Region).

Emacs also provides commands to kill specific syntactic units: words, with M-<DEL> and M-d (see Words); balanced expressions, with C-M-k (see Expressions); and sentences, with C-x <DEL> and M-k (see Sentences).

The command M-z (zap-to-char) combines killing with searching: it reads a character and kills from point up to (and including) the next occurrence of that character in the buffer. A numeric argument acts as a repeat count; a negative argument means to search backward and kill text before point.