In modern Emacs versions the top of the kill ring can be found in the Edit menu, and there are other packages to help navigate it: https://www.emacswiki.org/ema

In modern Emacs versions the top of the kill ring can be found in the Edit menu, and there are other packages to help navigate it: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseKillRing https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseKillRing I agree that the ancient terminology is a problem with Emacs. People who are used to Emacs don't want to change it, but it is alien to all new users. Funnily enough, in vi (a competing old text editor that predates current UI standards) "yank" means "copy". Another example is "window" and "frame", which mean the opposite that you would think if you have used any modern windowing system. A similar problem (that is not strictly about terminology) is the way "undo" works. It is more powerful than the standard undo/redo system, but it can be very confusing when you encounter it the first time. Repeated "undo" commands work the way they do in other programs, but once you run any other command, the undo operations go in the undo history just like other commands and are themselves undoable, so the way to cancel an undo operation (which is called "redo" in many other programs) is to type some character and then run "undo" twice.