Reducing Friction when Copying Whole Buffer To Kill Ring

Just a quick one today.

In keeping with the ongoing effort to reduce friction in the venerable Emacs text editor, I realized that a common action I often perform is copying the entire contents of the buffer, usually for pasting elsewhere.

To perform this I have chained together some emacs commands, namely (mark-whole-buffer) and then (kill-ring-save)

The problem with pushing the buffer to the kill ring in this manner is that I lose the current cursor position/point and end up using isearch to navigate my way back. Strangely, it is only recently that I have found this annoying!

There are a few options to address this:

• Use Emacs marks
• Create a macro
• Create a defun

Initially I tried the setting mark option meaning that I C-<SPC> C-<SPC> to set the mark at the current position and then C-u C-<SPC> to pop back to my previous mark set. The only issue is that (mark-whole-buffer) creates a mark at the end of the selected region and my first mark pop would be to this position, so I have to mark pop again.

The benefit of this approach is that I will start becoming more familiar with setting marks and navigating more efficiently within Emacs, which I really think I should learn. However, it all feels a little clunky, and you know what? I’m just going to write a simple elisp defun and bind it.

save-excursion, in this case, can be extremely useful!

(defun my/copy-buffer-to-kill-ring ()
  "Copy the entire buffer to the kill ring without changing the point."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (kill-ring-save (point-min) (point-max))))

(bind-key* (kbd "M-s z") #'my/copy-buffer-to-kill-ring)