Registers

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Revision as of 18:30, 29 March 2012 by Kindahero (talk | contribs)
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Emacs registers are compartments where you can save text, rectangles, positions, and other things for later use. Once you save text or a rectangle in a register, you can copy it into the buffer once, or many times; once you save a position in a register, you can jump back to that position once, or many times.

Each register has a name that consists of a single character, which we will denote by r; r can be a letter (such as ‘a’) or a number (such as ‘1’); case matters, so register ‘a’ is not the same as register ‘A’.

A register can store a position, a piece of text, a rectangle, a number, a window configuration, or a file name, but only one thing at any given time. Whatever you store in a register remains there until you store something else in that register. To see what register r contains, use M-x view-register


  • Position: Saving positions in registers.
  • Text: Saving text in registers.
  • Rectangle: Saving rectangles in registers.
  • Configurations: Saving window configurations in registers.
  • Numbers: Numbers in registers.
  • Files: File names in registers.
  • Bookmarks: Bookmarks are like registers, but persistent.