Vim pasting -- scroll through previously yanked text

Question

I am trying to improve the usability of the paste functionality in Vim because too many different deletion operations (in fact I do reckon it's all of them) will also yank to the paste buffer.

What this means is that I am no longer able to delete some piece of text I want to paste somewhere, clean something up, and then do my paste. I don't know why this is the order that I prefer to do things, but I'm not about to change it.

I have to basically do the move "atomically" before returning to do clean-up, else I get a frustrating paste of a comma or bracket or space. Oh, I know the reason why I do it in the other order. It's just plain more efficient. I wouldn't have to move to the destination, then return to clean up, then go back again.

How to improve this? My suggestion is a plugin that can be used to augment the paste operation after the fact. hit p, see that it pasted a useless ephemeral deleted char, and at this point (immediately after a paste operation) our plugin will allow a key to cycle through the previously delete-yanked registers, updating our paste in-place.

This way I can delete things all I want, and I'll actually be able to pull up any recent deleted item quickly, so long as it was a contiguous segment. Which is of course easy to set up with a visual selection followed by a delete. This trades specificity for ease-of-use, as I no longer need to remember to specify some specific named register to use for a particular paste.

In particular, there should be a stack that both yanks and deletes accumulate into, that is later quickly traversed during pasting using a single bind.

Is there a plugin out there that already does this?

Answer 1

You are a bit confused about the numbered registers (:h quote_number).

There is only one yank register and that is "0.

Separate from that there are nine numbered delete registers "1 to "9. These are filled as a queue with the most recent delete at the top.

For the delete registers "1 to "9 Vim has the functionality you are asking for built in: You can paste "1p, and if it isn't what you're looking for you can repeat u. u. u. to toggle through the registers "2, "3, "4, etc., until you've found the right one. This behaviour is documented at :h redo-register.

Scrolling through previously yanked text is most often done with plugins, the most popular ones I know of being

• YankRing.vim, "Maintains a history of previous yanks, changes and deletes", and
• yankstack, "lightweight implementation of emacs' kill ring for vim".

Answer 2

Why not use a named register? For example, use "ay to yank to register a, then "ap to paste from it again later, and it won't get clobbered by normal deletes etc. in the meantime.