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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.
copy-to-register
).
insert-register
).
When register r contains text, you can use C-x r +
(increment-register
) to append to that register. Note that
command C-x r + behaves differently if r contains a
number. See Number Registers.
C-x r s r stores a copy of the text of the region into the register named r. If the mark is inactive, Emacs first reactivates the mark where it was last set. The mark is deactivated at the end of this command. See Mark. C-u C-x r s r, the same command with a prefix argument, copies the text into register r and 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 prefix 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 instead of
appending it.
When you are collecting text using append-to-register
and
prepend-to-register
, you may want to separate individual
collected pieces using a separator. In that case, configure a
register-separator
and store the separator text in to that
register. For example, to get double newlines as text separator
during the collection process, you can use the following setting.
(setq register-separator ?+) (set-register register-separator "\n\n")
C-x r i r inserts in the buffer the text from register r. Normally it leaves point before the text and sets the mark after, without activating it. With a numeric argument, it instead puts point after the text and the mark before.