### 4.4 Clip Commands

These commands control the clipping system. A clip is a snippet of text separate from any document, which you can save to a file or insert into a document. You can select text in a document and copy it to a clip, optionally deleting it from your text. You can also load text directly from a file into a clip. `ne` can have any number of clips, which are distinguished by an integer. Most clip commands act on the current clip, which can be selected with `ClipNumber`. Clips can be copied and pasted in two ways—normally (as lines of text) or vertically (as a rectangular block of characters).

Note that by using the `Through` command you can automatically pass a (possibly vertical) block of text through any filter (such as `sort` under un*x).