Any time you copy (M-w
) or cut (C-w
) anything in emacs, it is added to the kill-ring (emacs’ version of a clipboard). This keeps a history of all the stuff you have previously copied or cut. After you have pasted (yanked in emacs-speak) text with C-y
, you can use M-y
as the next key to cycle through the history of all previous text that was cut or copied.
M-y
runs the command yank-pop
, but this can be substituted with fancier ways of using the kill-ring that we may come back to in due course.