How do I cancel a paste operation in Vim?

Question

I had rather a lot of text on my clipboard whenever I accidentally right clicked inside Putty (with Vim open), and Vim has initiated a paste operation which has been going for around ten minutes now.

I don't want to lose my unsaved work, is there a way to instruct Vim to stop pasting text?

Answer 1

If you're in normal mode, Ctrl-C aborts the current command in progress. Then press u to undo anything that changed before you stopped it.