mark-whole-buffer followed by kill-ring-save not working correctly

Question

I'm using Emacs 26.1 on MacOS. Instead of copying the entire buffer I get a warning:

Saved text until "text where is
    stopped saving with whitespace
    seemingly to the end of the buffer
"

I'm doing this with C-x h M-w (default bindings for those commands).

I have a workaround:

C-x h M-x copy-region-as-kill RET works fine, and I'm kind of OK with rebinding M-w to copy-region-as-kill. I would however like to know if there are other implications that I've not thought of, and what is causing the trouble in the first place.

Answer 1

Do you see the same behavior of not copying the text to the kill-ring if you start Emacs using emacs -Q (no init file?)

I don't see it. That is, C-h k makes the whole buffer the region and activates the region. Then M-w copies that text to the kill-ring.

The message you show is not a warning. It is simply a confirmation that that text was saved to the kill-ring. As you can see, it says Saved text until, followed by the text at the end of the region. It shows you such a message when the entire active region is not visible in the current screenful, i.e., when some of it is outside the window.

I'm betting that if you use C-y in a different buffer (so you can see the result easily) after you get that message that saved text will be pasted.

(All M-w does is copy the text; it does not paste it.)