Question

Something I do often in Emacs is to cut a bit of text, and then replace another bit with the cut text. So, say I’ve got the text I want to yank as the last item in my kill-ring. I yank it into the new place, then kill the text that was already there. But now the killed text is the latest item in the kill-ring. So next time I want to yank the first item, I have to do C-y M-y. Then the next time there are two more recent items in the kill-ring, so I have to do C-y M-y M-y, and so on.

I’m guessing there’s a better way to do this. Can someone enlighten me please?

Answer 1

You should use delete-region instead of kill-region.

delete-region deletes the region without putting it in the kill ring. It is bind to <menu-bar> <edit> <clear> by default.

If you only want to use default bindings without using the menu, you could use delete-rectangle with C-x r d but it works on rectangle. It could be fine to use it on a single line like delete-region.