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2.3.3 Killing and Deleting

Hemlock has many commands which kill text. Killing is a variety of deletion which saves the deleted text for later retrieval. The killed text is saved in a ring buffer known as the kill ring. Killing has two main advantages over deletion:

  1. If text is accidentally killed, a not uncommon occurrence, then it can be restored.
  2. Text can be moved from one place to another by killing it and then restoring it in the new location.

Killing is not the same as deleting. When a command is said to delete text, the text is permanently gone and is not pushed on the kill ring. Commands which delete text generally only delete things of little importance, such as single characters or whitespace.