Registers and macros

This post brings information from a few places to provide a rundown of registers and macros in Vim.

Registers

• "r means register r
• "ryy copies current line to r
• "Ryy appends current line to r
• "rp pastes r
• :reg shows current registers

There are a few special registers

• "" unnamed register, yank/delete target, default for paste without register specified
• "0 stores last yank (so "0p pastes last yank regardless of deletes)
• "1 to "9 store history of deleted, the higher the older
• ". is the last inserted text, read-only
• "% is the current file path, read-only
• ": is last command, read-only
• "+ is the primary clipboard
• "* is the secondary clipboard
• "/ is last search (from any of /, ?, *, #)

Registers are persisted in the ShaDa file. We can ignore it by starting Neovim with nvim -i NONE.

Macros

Macros are recordings of keystrokes that we can replay. We can record a macro by pressing q in normal mode and specifying one letter to refer to our macro.

For example, qm starts recording macro m. We can stop recording a macro by pressing q again. Now, we can run this macro by pressing @m.

Why am I talking about macros? Macros are stored in Vim registers. Our macro is stored as text in register "m, We can "mp to paste. Edit it. Load back with "myy".

Moodboard

• https://neovim.io/doc/user/starting.html
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1497958/how-do-i-use-vim-registers
• https://www.brianstorti.com/vim-registers/