How to yank from the command line

vivim

I wonder if it is possible to yank something I have written in the command line from vim so I can later paste it again.

This would be particularly useful because I often try out search/replace patterns by just searching for them first and – if they match what I need – I would like to be able to just copy that searched expression from the command line and use it in my search/replace function.

I already know that you can paste into the command window by using <ctrl-r><buffer> and I just wonder if there is a command similar to this that will yank my whole command window.

Best Answer

You can use the command line window. Use q+: to open it. Then you can navigate the window as an ordinary one and yank what you want to yank.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

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Use \r instead of \n.

Related Topic

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.