Easy pasting to Windows applications
From Vim Tips Wiki
[edit] Duplicate tip
This tip is very similar to the following:
These tips need to be merged – see the merge guidelines.
Tip 21 Previous Tip • Next Tip
Created: February 25, 2001 Complexity: basic Author: jean Minimum version: 5.7 Karma: 186/83 Imported from: Tip#21
In Vim, the unnamed register is the " register, and the Windows Clipboard is the * register.
This means that if you yank something, you have to yank it to the * register if you want to paste it into a Windows app. If this is too much trouble, set the 'clipboard' option to 'unnamed'. Then you always yank to *.
So pasting to windows apps doesn't require prefixing "* :
set clipboard=unnamed
[edit] Comments
You can also have the Visual selection automatically copied to the clipboard. If you
:set go+=a
and then make a Visual selection, you can switch to another application (such as your mail reader) and paste.
Since the * buffer won't allow (as far as I know anyway) appending to it, you also do something like:
"aY
to grab a line then move somewhere else
"AY
to append another line to the a buffer. Then:
:let @*=@a
This puts both lines into the * buffer for pasting.
This tip, set clipboard=unnamed, also works under the X windowing system.
BenArmston 09:52, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
