Stedi is equipped with 8 buffers for normal editing. Under ordinary circumstances this should be more than enough. In addition there are two special buffers for cut and paste operations. They are called the yank buffers and are used for intermediate storage of pieces of text that have been cut or copied from the text of one of the other buffers. The yank buffers can also be used as normal buffers when necessary. They are then labeled YANK buffer (buffer-9) and yank buffer (buffer-0) respectively. There are however some caveats. During a cut or copy operation, the yank buffer that will be used is cleared first, so anything that might be in it before the operation is lost. Which yank buffer will be used for a cut or copy operation can be seen in the status line. The fifth status character is either a Y or a y indicating the YANK or the yank buffer respectively. The use of the Alt-Y key combination toggles between these two yank buffers to select the one to be used for the next cut or paste operation.
The buffer that is currently displayed on the screen is called the current or active buffer. The number of the current buffer is displayed in the status bar in the eighth position among the status characters. There are two different ways to change from one buffer to another.