I never use the rectangle commands as often as I should.
Here’s my shopping list:
```
Bread
Cheese
Milk
Yoghurt
```
I want to make the above into a list. There are all sorts of ways I could so this, one way is to use the string-rectangle command. Set (or highlight) the region to zero width in front of the list and then **C-x r t -** to insert a dash before each of the words.
You can use the kill-rectangle command to remove unwanted bullet points (particularly useful when importing text from PDFs)
Set the region to cover the bullet symbols and then **C-x r k** to kill the rectangle. Don’t forget you can **C-x r y** yank that rectangle back.
**C-x r o** or open-rectangle is a quick way to indent a block of text to where you want it, especially if you can’t remember the other commands.
And lastly **C-x r c** will clear a rectangular space. I can’t remember ever using that one, to be honest...
If you find pressing C-x r a keystroke too far, read this post on [[C-x r|remapping C-x r to C-\`]]
# Summary of Commands
| Key Binding | Command |
| ------------------ | ----------------------------------- |
| **C-x r k** | Kill rectangle |
| **C-x r y** | yank last killed rectangle |
| **C-x r c** | Clear rectangle |
| **C-x r o** | open rectangle and shift text right |
| **C-x r t spoons** | fill rectangle with spoons |
| **C-x r r q** | Copy rectangle to register q |
| **C-x r i q** | Insert rectangle from register q |