Vim Feature of the Day
We all know programmers who, when they need to copy/paste more than one thing, just use a temporary window to keep track of the copied data. Well vim has that feature solved.
First off, we have multiple copy/paste buffers, known as registers. So I can copy and paste three different things into three different registers. To copy a line to register a, use “ayy. Then to paste that line you would use “ap. So we have plenty of registers. It gets better! What if you want to copy a bunch of stuff into one register? Well, first I would clear it with :let @a = “, but that’s not required. Anyway, you can add to a register by using “Ayy. This will copy the current line onto “a. So you can do this over and over to add to the “a register!
But that requires too much work. Yesterday I wanted to add all lines with the word “name” into “a. Here is how I can do that with one line: :g/name/y A.
Awesome!
(The following includes affiliate links.)
If you’d like to learn more, I can recommend two excellent books. I first
learned how to use vi from
Learning the vi and Vim Editors
Second, if you really want to up your editing game, check out
Practical Vim
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