How to paste over without overwriting register

Question

Does anyone know of a way to paste over a visually selected area without having the selection placed in the default register?

I know I can solve the problem by alway

Answer 1

Try this in your ~/.vimrc:

xnoremap <expr> p 'pgv"'.v:register.'y'

• xnoremap means that this is only for Visual mode, not Visual + Select modes.

• <expr> means that {rhs} of the xnoremap {lhs} {rhs} setting is evaluated as an expression.

• In this case, our expression of 'pgv"'.v:register.'y' is using . for concatenation.

• v:register is evaluated to the register being used during the fulfillment of the mapping.

The result of "xp would evaluate to pgv"xy, where x is the register.

I was helped by an answer to this stackoverflow question: Vim - mapping with an optional register prefix in conjunction with Benoit's answer on this page

Answer 2

Use the following:

xnoremap p pgvy

this will reselect and re-yank any text that is pasted in visual mode.

Edit: in order this to work with "xp you can do:

xnoremap p pgv"@=v:register.'y'<cr>

v:register expands to the last register name used in a normal mode command.

Answer 3

Luc's function worked well for me after I made a change to support the fact that I have clipboard=unnamed set:

function! RestoreRegister()
    let @" = s:restore_reg
    if &clipboard == "unnamed"
        let @* = s:restore_reg
    endif
    return ''
endfunction

Answer 4

"{register}p won't work as you describe. It will replace the selection with the content of the register. You will have instead to do something like:

" I haven't found how to hide this function (yet)
function! RestoreRegister()
  let @" = s:restore_reg
  return ''
endfunction

function! s:Repl()
    let s:restore_reg = @"
    return "p@=RestoreRegister()\<cr>"
endfunction

" NB: this supports "rp that replaces the selection by the contents of @r
vnoremap <silent> <expr> p <sid>Repl()

Which should be fine as long as you don't use a plugin that has a non-nore vmap to p, and that expects a register to be overwritten.

This code is available as a script there. Ingo Karkat also defined a plugin solving the same issue.

Answer 5

Luc Hermitte's did the trick! Really good. Here's his solution put in a toggle function, so you can switch between normal behavior and no-replace-register put.

the command ,u toggles the behavior

let s:putSwap = 1 
function TogglePutSwap()
    if s:putSwap
        vnoremap <silent> <expr> p <sid>Repl()
        let s:putSwap = 0 
        echo 'noreplace put'
    else
        vnoremap <silent> <expr> p p 
        let s:putSwap = 1 
        echo 'replace put'
    endif
    return
endfunction
noremap ,p :call TogglePutSwap()<cr>

Answer 6

duct-tape programming, but works for me:

nmap viwp viwpyiw
nmap vi'p vi'pyi'
nmap vi"p vi"pyi"
nmap vi(p vi(pyi(
nmap vi[p vi[pyi[
nmap vi<p vi<pyi<