TIL: Visual Paste without Yank in Vim
Last updated: Sun Jul 23 2023
A common pattern I follow in vim is yanking some text, then making a visual selection
(with v, for single characters, or V, for lines) and pasting with p to replace the visual selection.
That’s as close as vim gets to a standard Cmd-c/Cmd-v flow that most text editing has.
One annoyance I’ve always had, however, is that a visual paste with p will put whatever was replaced in the unnamed register,
which is what p defaults to. So you can’t make the same replacement multiple times - you have to re-yank before pasting again or specify the “yank register” with "0p.
However, it turns out that more recent versions of vim fix that - if you use P instead of p,
your visual paste will not overwrite the unnamed register.