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.

Sometimes I end up with complex window configs while working in emacs, as you see in the title image. Using Winner mode you can easily track linearly backward through your screens, “undo” style; but sometimes I have a set up–as when developing a system–that I want to return to frequently. It turns out you have Window Registers for this purpose, and they work well. window-configuration-to-register: C-x r w <key> This saves it for easy reloading with C-x r j <key> and you’re back where you want to be!