Re: emacs terminology

[Leo Butler <leo.butler@umanitoba.ca>]

"Y. E." <yet@ego.team> writes:

> Hi Luca,
>
>> this could sound like trolling
>
> To me personally this sounds as a fine question.
>
>> I'm really curious to understand
>> (if possibile) how did Emacs come up with terms like "kill" and
>> "yank".
>> Is there any resource that explains it?
>
> The only source I found investigating this question is this
> SE thread:
>
> https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/17056/what-is-the-origin-of-the-term-yank

See the first 3 paragraphs of section 12.1 of the Emacs manual:

#+begin_quote
File: emacs.info,  Node: Deletion and Killing,  Next: Yanking,  Up: Killing

12.1 Deletion and Killing
=========================

Most commands which erase text from the buffer save it in the kill ring
(*note Kill Ring::).  These are known as “kill” commands, and their
names normally contain the word ‘kill’ (e.g., ‘kill-line’).  The kill
ring stores several recent kills, not just the last one, so killing is a
very safe operation: you don’t have to worry much about losing text that
you previously killed.  The kill ring is shared by all buffers, so text
that is killed in one buffer can be yanked into another buffer.

   When you use ‘C-/’ (‘undo’) to undo a kill command (*note Undo::),
that brings the killed text back into the buffer, but does not remove it
from the kill ring.

   On graphical displays, killing text also copies it to the system
clipboard.  *Note Cut and Paste::.

   Commands that erase text but do not save it in the kill ring are
known as “delete” commands; their names usually contain the word
‘delete’.  These include ‘C-d’ (‘delete-char’) and <DEL>
(‘delete-backward-char’), which delete only one character at a time, and
those commands that delete only spaces or newlines.  Commands that can
erase significant amounts of nontrivial data generally do a kill
operation instead.
#+end_quote

Leo