Question

Today I saw a neat copy function in VI, in which you could copy an entire line until a stop character.

e.g. if( copy == this );

With VI he could copy everything inside the parenthesis. I wonder if you can do it with emacs as well? (Without using ctrl+space and manually marking what I want to kill)

Answer 1

Try

M-z CHAR

Which kills the text through the next occurrence of CHAR. Aka M-x zap-to-char. Of interest might be the documentation for Other Kill Commands.

Edited to add: Upon request, here is zap-to-before-char, which just took the source code for zap-to-char and removed a comment (and updated doc string):

(defun zap-to-before-char (arg char)
  "Kill up to and ARGth occurrence of CHAR.
Case is ignored if `case-fold-search' is non-nil in the current buffer.
Goes backward if ARG is negative; error if CHAR not found."
  (interactive "p\ncZap to char: ")
  ;; Avoid "obsolete" warnings for translation-table-for-input.
  (with-no-warnings
    (if (char-table-p translation-table-for-input)
        (setq char (or (aref translation-table-for-input char) char))))
  (kill-region (point) (progn
                         (search-forward (char-to-string char) nil nil arg)
                         (goto-char (if (> arg 0) (1- (point)) (1+ (point))))
                         (point))))