Is there any way to edit the kill-ring?

Question

Are there any tools to directly edit the kill-ring?

If I open xah-show-kill-ring, I'm tempted to edit the contents directly.

So why not try it? What's the worst that can happen? In any case, did you C-h v kill-ring? — NickD, Dec 13 '23 at 12:39
Why? What are you really trying to do? Sounds like an X-Y question. — Drew, Dec 13 '23 at 17:23
Well, right now I first copied the type of a variable, then I copied the name of the variable, which also included a comma at the end. Then I opened the kill buffer and wanted to move the type to the same entry as the name and remove the comma. It seemed like a natural thing to do. What I usually do is yank first what I have in the kill-ring, then open the kill-ring and yank the second part, then combine them and kill them again, so that I can yank it in to where I need it to be. I'm not really sure what is the best way, but I'd like to explore working directly on the kill-ring;) — Jason Hunter, Dec 13 '23 at 21:11

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 13 '23 at 20:58

The contents of the kill ring is, by definition, the value of the variable kill-ring, which is a list of strings. You can change the contents of the kill ring by modifying this variable and (depending on what you're doing) updating kill-ring-yank-pointer accordingly.

I don't think Emacs comes with any convenient interface to edit the kill ring. You have to write Lisp code or use a third-party package.

At least browse-kill-ring (available from MELPA) and browse-kill-ring+ have an interface to edit and remove kill ring entries. (But not to add: just copy something. And not to reorder.)

There are many other kill ring browsing interfaces, but I don't know if they have editing capabilities.

No. browse-kill-ring+ is neither unmaintained nor a fork of anything. It enhances what browse-kill-ring.el offers. I've edited the answer to remove that characterization. — Drew, Dec 13 '23 at 20:57

Is there any way to edit the kill-ring?

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