How to copy killed rectangle to the kill ring

Question

I frequently extract a rectangle of text from a buffer, but then find I want to yank the text as if it was not a rectangle. Is there a way to add the current killed rectangle to the kill ring?

The GNU Emacs Manual has this to say:

“Killing” a rectangle is not killing in the usual sense; the rectangle is not stored in the kill ring, but in a special place that only records the most recent rectangle killed. This is because yanking a rectangle is so different from yanking linear text that different yank commands have to be used. Yank-popping is not defined for rectangles.

However, I can basically get the behavior I want with

• M-> go to end of buffer
• C-x r y yank rectangle
• C-x C-x exchange point and mark (selects newly-yanked lines)
• C-w kill the selection to the kill ring

Is there a better way to turn a killed rectangle into a kill-ring entry?

Answer 1

If I understood your question, your are looking to something like this:

(defun youngfrog/copy-rectangle-to-kill-ring (start end)
  "Saves a rectangle to the normal kill ring. Not suitable for yank-rectangle."
  (interactive "r")
  (let ((lines (extract-rectangle start end)))
    (with-temp-buffer
      (while lines ;; insert-rectangle, but without the unneeded stuff
        ;; (most importantly no push-mark)
        (insert-for-yank (car lines))
        (insert "\n")
        (setq lines (cdr lines)))
      (kill-ring-save (point-min) (point-max)))))

Courtesy of ErgoEmacs

Answer 2

Not sure what is special about having the rectangle in the kill-ring, but if you upgrade to Emacs-24.4, then you can do: C-x SPC .... M-w to select a rectangle and place it on the kill-ring. After that C-y will yank that rectangle (in the same was that C-x r y does, tho).

Answer 3

I was initially annoyed by the lack of a built-in solution to this problem, then realized that there was a built-in solution: kill-rectangle.

Say you have text like

AAA BBBBBBBBB
AAA BBB
AAA BBBBBBB

But want the 'B' part of the text somewhere else, like between these C and D lines:

CCCCC
CCC
DDDD
DD

If you copy the B rectangle (C-x r M-w) and then place point at the first 'D', then yank the rectangle back (C-x r y), you end up with

CCCCC
CCC
BBBBBBBBBDDDD
BBB      DD
BBBBBBB  

where you really wanted

CCCCC
CCC
BBBBBBBBB
BBB
BBBBBBB
DDDD
DD

It might seem natural to copy the rectangle of 'B's and yank them to the new location, but a better solution is to simply copy the lines 'A and 'B' lines and and yank them in their entirety between the 'C' and 'D' lines.

Then, mark the rectangle containing the 'A's and use kill-rectangle (C-x r k) to end with the desired result.