Practical: Registers

Continuing with the trite university themed Vim 101 posts, I thought it would be useful to drop in the occasional practical lesson. Something for you to practice to develop good habits when using Vim.

One thing that tripped me up early on was registers. I managed to get used to yanking and putting text, but I kept overwriting the default register when I actually wanted to keep that content hanging around.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the black hole register, and I included a note about copying the default register. I believe that it’s better to get used to thinking “should I yank this into a register?” before applying an operator command.

Even if I’m deleting text with d, or using the change operator -- particularly cit (change inner tag) or ci" (change in a quote) I'll consider using a register.

Let’s say I’ve got some HTML and I want to replace the contents:

<strong>Read usevim!</strong>

If I wanted to retain the text but still replace it, I could dump it into a register with "acit. This might seem like a complex command, but you can break it down like this:

• "a -- Before doing anything else, put the result of the operator command into register a
• cit -- Remove the text inside the nearest XML tags, and enter Insert mode

So that huge, weird-looking "acit can be regarded as two relatively simple operations. Now I can rewrite the contents of the tag and put the text somewhere else later on.

Try to get used to thinking “should I prefix this operator command with a register?” — it’ll slow you down at first, but after a while it becomes second nature and more efficient.