Hello,

I received a mail from Michael Slass, which I will quote here with
permission:

On Tue, 2002-04-23 at 17:35, Michael Slass wrote:
> Colin:
> 
> I just found browse-kill-ring, and I really like it; thanks for
> writing it.  I wasn't sure where to bind it on my keyboard, but then
> I thought of that annoying message you get - "The last command was not
> a yank" - when you accidentally hit M-y, and thought that would be a
> great place to put it.

I think this idea is so good that it should be the default behavior for
Emacs.  

Attached is a patch for review.  This patch doesn't remove any behavior,
but it is conceptually a fairly large change, so I think we should
consider it carefully.

There are several pros and cons, as I see it.  The main thing we gain is
that the old behavior of M-y was useless if the previous command wasn't
a yank, and the suggested new behavior is, I personally believe, quite
useful.

The main disadvantage I see is that users may type just M-y accidentally
and be confused.  For this reason, I've made C-g quit the kill ring menu
as well (as Michael Slass suggested in a later message).  Further
suggestions here would be appreciated.

As for the patch itself: basically, I renamed `browse-kill-ring' to
`kill-ring-menu', removed the more esoteric functionality (like editing
kill ring entries), and rewrote it to use font lock, among other things.

Some minor points:

I have moved all the killing stuff out from simple.el into kill-ring.el;
I feel that anything which defines a mode should, as a general
principle, be in a separate file.  However, if there is disagreement
about this, we can put everything back in simple.el.  It is not
important to the main change.

There are some minor additions to font-lock.el; ignore those for the
moment, please.  I'm just sharing some code between replace.el and
kill-ring.el (and probably ibuffer.el soon).

Finally, I'm not totally satisfied with the manual additions; there are
some bootstrapping issues, since we haven't discussed windows at that
point in the manual yet, etc.