The Simple Genius of Emacs Registers It’s been in emacs since the beginning, and is not had in many other editors, yet many people don’t know about it. Registers. The documentation talks about many types, most of which I haven’t tried yet. The three I use the most, however, are: Text in register. Suppose I want a chunk of text but am doing something that will pollute my kill ring, so I can’t just yank (paste) every time.