How to display list of previous copies/kills (`M-w` or `C-w`)?

Question

C-n C-y retrieves the n-last call to C-w, I think. Is there a way to show all that were saved?

Answer 1

The command counsel-yank-pop which is part of the swiper package, gives you an interactive way to browse and insert elements from you kill ring.

Answer 2

Check the value of the kill-ring variable e.g. with C-h v kill-ring RET, or perhaps better, evaluate it in the *scratch* buffer with kill-ring C-j. The doc string of the variable says:

List of killed text sequences.

Since the kill ring is supposed to interact nicely with cut-and-paste facilities offered by window systems, use of this variable should interact nicely with interprogram-cut-function and interprogram-paste-function. The functions kill-new, kill-append, and current-kill are supposed to implement this interaction; you may want to use them instead of manipulating the kill ring directly.

See also the kill ring section in the Emacs Lisp manual.

Answer 3

I would say what you want is provided by one of theses packages :

• Popup-killring - Browse kill-ring with popup menu.
• Browse-kill-ring - Visually navigate kill-ring.

Spacemacs uses consel-yank-pop acessible with SPC-r-y (command already cited by @Heikki) provided by swipper. So you can also look at it.