Vim alter text as or immediately after it's put

Question

Lately I've been yanking and putting a lot of code that needs to be altered somewhat (usually just a simple substitution). I can manually select it after it's pasted in, or for longer blocks I suppose I could look at the number of lines pasted (20 new lines) and use 20:s..., but given that it's vim, it seems like there should be an easier/faster way to do this.

So is there a way to either select or execute a substitution on text as it's being put?

Answer 1

Immediately after the execution of the p, the [ and ] marks refer to the start and end line numbers of the pasted region (applies during y as well). See the help for '[ and '] for explanation.

Thus, you can use these marks to form the range on which to work the :s, as :'[,']s///. This will then work on the region just yanked or pasted. Sure, it's not short, but if you care about it you can map it. Perhaps something like nnoremap <Leader>p p:'[,']s/.

Answer 2

Chris Morgan already posted the best solution. But you can also do some kinds of manipulation directly on the text in the register. The default register for yank is ", so you can do something like:

:let @" = substitute(@",'someword', 'somedifferentword','g')

Then paste the altered register text. Not as easy for manipulation related to line-context in multi-line register text, since the text in register is a single string with one begin pattern (^) and one end ($). But still can be useful.

Just thought I'd throw it out there, since this is something I sometimes do.