pushing and popping the mark

[Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I have found myself doing some repetitive editing recently that I am sure can be optimised.

Let's say I have a chunk of existing text (in the middle of the buffer), and a bunch of new text (at the bottom of the buffer) with bits of text that I want to selectively kill and then yank into the existing text.

So the workflow looks like this:

1. go to "new text", kill some relevant text
2. go to "existing text", yank
3. repeat


In terms of keys strokes this means:

1. `C-U SPACE` (now near relevant "new text") then unavoidable manual keystrokes to select/kill
2. `C-SPACE C-SPACE`, then `C-U SPACE` (does nothing) to add this location to the mark ring and ignore that mark in the ring.
3. `C-U SPACE` (now near relevant "existing text") then unavoidable manual keystrokes to yank
4. `C-SPACE C-SPACE`, then `C-U SPACE` (does nothing) to add this location to the mark ring

Actually, my fingers can confused and end up just using pageup/down :-/

Obviously, steps 2 and 4 are undesirable. Is there a single command that I can perform to effectively save the current point, then go to the second mark in the mark ring?

Or, equivalently, save the point, visit the head of the mark ring (possibly pop it, I don't need it anymore) and then push the saved point to the head of the mark ring.

(Probably I would have finished my work already instead of writing this email...)


Best regards,
Sam