Practical Vim

Tip 60

Grok Vim’s Registers

Rather than using a single clipboard for all cut, copy, and paste operations, Vim provides multiple registers. When we use the delete, yank, and put commands, we can specify which register we want to interact with.

Addressing a Register

The delete, yank, and put commands all interact with one of Vim’s registers. We can specify which register we want to use by prefixing the command with "{register}. If we don’t specify a register, then Vim will use the unnamed register.

For example, if we wanted to yank the current word into register a, we could run "ayiw. Or if we wanted to cut the current line into register b, we could run "bdd. Then we could paste the word from register a by typing "ap, or we could paste the ...