How to stop C-backspace or M-backspace from copying text?

Question

Deleting a chunk of text from the cursor causes the deleted contents to be copied into the kill ring, overwriting whatever I had stored there. How do I stop this from happening?

Answer 1

If you look at what M-backspace calls using C-h <M-backspace> you see that it calls backward-kill-word that function simply calls kill-word with a negative argument. The kill-word function is coded as:

(defun kill-word (arg)
  "Kill characters forward until encountering the end of a word.
With argument ARG, do this that many times."
  (interactive "p")
  (kill-region (point) (progn (forward-word arg) (point))))

If we write a function that does the same thing using delete-region instead of kill-region we'll get the desired result. Here is our new delete-word function:

(defun delete-word (arg)
  "Delete characters forward until encountering the end of a word.
With argument ARG, do this that many times."
  (interactive "p")
  (delete-region (point) (progn (forward-word arg) (point))))

We can now write our own backward-delete-word using backward-kill-work as an example like this:

(defun backward-delete-word (arg)
  "Delete characters backward until encountering the beginning of a word.
With argument ARG, do this that many times."
  (interactive "p")
  (delete-word (- arg)))

afterwards all we need to do is bind this new function to <M-backspace>!

If you have any questions just let me know!