past yanked content in rectangular selection with vim8

Question

I have some long text on Yank var e.g. "Hello all how are you ?"

I have a rectangular selection between abc and ABC /a llC-vjj

a A
b B
C C

And I want to past my long text without having to type it

To get this:

a Hello all how are you ? A
b Hello all how are you ? B
c Hello all how are you ? C

From @christian-Brabandt I select (| is where my cursor is) not the line but characters like this:

|Hello how are you ?
vllllllllllllllllllly

then I put the cursor on 'a'

a A
b B
C C

and press 'p'

I got

aHello how are you ? A
b B
C C

So with this method I have to add a space with i <ESC>, go on b type pi <ESC> go on c` ...

Not optimal because not using the block selection ;(

Answer 1

It is not very clear from the question, what the goal is (e.g. what the final result should look like). So let me describe what you can do.

First, store your text in register a:

:let @a='Hello all how are you ?'

A register does not only store text, it also remembers whether it has been used in line wise, character wise or block wise mode. You can influence this using the 3rd argument of the setreg() function.

Now with a sample like this:

a A
b B
c C

1. Pasting in character wise mode

After 1), the register content will be in character wise mode, as :echo getregtype('a') confirms. So block selecting the empty space after the capital letters (1gg$<c-v>2j) and hitting "ap will result in:

2. Pasting in line wise mode

Change the register a to be linewise: call setreg('a', getreg('a'), 'l') Now, block select the empty space after the capital letters (1gg$<c-v>2j) and hitting "ap will result in:

3. Pasting in block wise mode

Change the register a to be linewise: call setreg('a', getreg('a'), 'b') Now, block select the empty space after the capital letters (1gg$<c-v>2j) and hitting "ap will result in:

So you need to define, how register should be handled and you might need to change the register type if needed.

Note, there also exist plugins to make handling this easier. Ingo Karkat maintains a plugin UnconditionalPaste, that can be used to force pasting a register with a different type.

Answer 2

TL;DR

You can accomplish this by using q to record a sequence of operations and @ to replay it.

Assumptions

I think you want this output:

a Hello all how are you ? A
b Hello all how are you ? B
c Hello all how are you ? C

A paste like you describe would be quite a useful feature, I agree, but I did some tests and I don't see how to do it in my vim 7.4 installation.

Recording as a solution

The solution I found uses q to record pasting the line once, and then replaying the recorded commands twice:

Set the cursor on A and record doing the insertion once:

q1P6bjq

Explanation:

• q1: start recording into register 1
• P: insert the text - you could type it out, as well
• 6bj: place the cursor on B to be ready to paste on the next line
• q: stop recording

Then replay register 1 twice, or however many times are needed:

2@1

Before replaying, make sure the cursor is still on B, and things should work.

I agree, this is not nearly as nice as a block-duplicated paste as you describe in the question, but it works.

vim 8

PS: with Vim 8 or more recent, a simple paste over a block selection is likely to work. See @ChristianBrabandt's answer for more details.