Emacs: Copy/Cut Current Line If No Selection

This page shows you how to customize emacs so that the Copy command will copy the current line when there's no text selection. Same for Cut.

By default, to copy/cut current line, you need to move the cursor to beginning of line, mark, move to end of line, then copy. This is 4 operations. The following code will make it just a single operation.

(defun copy-line-or-region ()
  "Copy current line, or current text selection."
  (interactive)
  (if (region-active-p)
      (kill-ring-save (region-beginning) (region-end))
    (kill-ring-save (line-beginning-position) (line-beginning-position 2)) ) )

(defun cut-line-or-region ()
  "Cut the current line, or current text selection."
  (interactive)
  (if (region-active-p)
      (kill-region (region-beginning) (region-end))
    (kill-region (line-beginning-position) (line-beginning-position 2)) ) )

Put the code in your emacs init file. When you do not have a text selection, copy/cut will just copy/cut the current line. This is now part of ErgoEmacs Keybinding.

You need to give them a key. 〔☛ Emacs: How to Define Keys〕 A great hand saver is to bind them to single keys. Like this:

(global-set-key (kbd "<f2>") 'cut-line-or-region) ; cut.
(global-set-key (kbd "<f3>") 'copy-line-or-region) ; copy.
(global-set-key (kbd "<f4>") 'yank) ; paste.

The code is inspired from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SlickCopy. Thanks to Joseph O'Donnell (site instantcallout.com) for mentioning this. Apparently, this behavior is default in VisualStudio, TextMate, Sublime Text, SlickEdit.