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TIL: Visual Paste without Yank in Vim

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.

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