Easy pasting to Windows applications

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created February 25, 2001 · complexity basic · author jean · version 5.7

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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

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.

• :help 'guioptions'
• :help quotestar

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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.

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