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In Bash and other shells in emacs mode, there are these awesome kill/yank shortcuts (see man readline), for example:

  • Ctrl+k: "kill-line": this deletes (and save into a cut buffer) all the current line before the cursor.
  • Ctrl+y: "yank" will paste under the cursor the last deleted content.
  • Alt+y: "yank-pop" will cycle through previous deleted content.

However I am in a situation where I want to:

  1. hit Ctrl+k,
  2. do stuff (type other commands),
  3. and then paste back the original line, but only if there was any content!

In the current settings, hitting Ctrl+k on an empty line leaves the cut buffer unchanged, so hitting Ctrl+y does not *restore* the original line.

I can't find how to clear this kill ring, is it doable (apart from switching to zsh...)?

slava
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PlasmaBinturong
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    A workaround is to kill the content+"a", then on paste delete that "a" character. Only works for automated binding (although I suppose that there's no reason to paste back an empty command when it's done manually) – user202729 Jun 03 '20 at 09:59
  • Clever. It's indeed for automation. The aim was to invisibly use a feature of tmux-resurrect, which saves panel history by sending commands to the terminals (I wanted to back up partially filled lines). I found a way using tput smcup/tput rmcup which enters/quits a second terminal buffer O.o ... – PlasmaBinturong Jun 03 '20 at 11:19

1 Answers1

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No -- kill ring is never cleared by readline library (used by bash), so there's no bindable command for that.

sendmoreinfo
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