How to paste in a new line with vim

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I often have to paste some stuff on a new line in vim. What I usually do is:

o<Esc>p

Which inserts a new line and puts me in insertion mode, than quits insertion mode, and finally pastes.

Three keystrokes. Not very efficient. Any better ideas?

Best Answer

Shortly after :help p it says:

:[line]pu[t] [x]    Put the text [from register x] after [line] (default
                    current line).  This always works |linewise|, thus
                    this command can be used to put a yanked block as
                    new lines.

:[line]pu[t]! [x]   Put the text [from register x] before [line]
                    (default current line).

Unfortunately it’s not shorter than your current solution unless you combined it with some keyboard map as suggested in a different answer. For instance, you can map it to any key (even p):

:nmap p :pu<CR>

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.

Eclipse – How to duplicate a whole line in Vim

yy or Y to copy the line (mnemonic: yank)
or
dd to delete the line (Vim copies what you deleted into a clipboard-like "register", like a cut operation)

then

p to paste the copied or deleted text after the current line
or
P to paste the copied or deleted text before the current line

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Eclipse – How to duplicate a whole line in Vim

Related Topic

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