Pasting with overwrite in Vim

Question

I want to be able to paste something from the buffer (probably using p), but instead of inserting it into the text, I want to replace whatever was there before (just like the R command). I've searched Google, vim documentation, and Stack Overflow but could not find anything on the issue. I imagine that it's just a command that I don't know about. Any help would be appreciated.

That's all I need to know, but if you want to know my specific problem:

Essentially I'm just trying to create a short script for documentation headers. At the beginning of every function I put the following:

// FunctionName <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

However adding all those <> gets annoying. I want to be able to place my cursor on a function name, press the F6 key and it produce the above. The problem, of course, is that function names are not constant sizes and it would make the "chain" look weird. So I just want to paste OVER a bunch of pre-made chain so that the whole thing will always be a constant number of characters. i.e.:

start with

//<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Paste " FunctionName " and end with

// FunctionName <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Answer 1

I found a much better solution

R Enter Replace mode: Each character you type replaces an existing character, starting with the character under the cursor.

So R <ctrl-r>" will do what you want. Note there is a space before and after <ctrl-r>".

OLD ANSWER

You can do this with a macro pretty easily

qhmhA <esc>a<><esc>40.80|D`hq

qh start macro
mh set mark
A <esc> insert a space after the existing text
a<><esc> insert '<>'
40. repeat last command 40 times
80| move to column 80
D delete to the end of the line
`h jump back to mark
q end macro

The macro can then be repeated with @h. You probably want to save this to your .vimrc like so

let @h = 'mhA ^[a<>^[40.80|D`h'

Note that the ^[ are supposed to be one character entered by pressing <ctrl-V><esc>

Answer 2

You can use visual selection.

• Vp select the whole line and overwrite with buffer
• viwp select the word under cursor and overwrite with buffer content.
• vi(p overwrite what is in between parenthesis.

I particularly like that it highlights what should be overwritten, which makes it easier to verify.