Register

The Finer Points of Repeat and Registers

The repeat change command, ., has an interesting side effect when combined with pasting a register: if you type "1p to put register 1, and then press ., you'll see the contents of register 2. You can repeat this up to the ninth register. To understand how…

Counting and Calculating with Vim

I was working with a particularly unfriendly SQL dump file which was raising errors indicating that my data had the wrong amount of columns. To figure out what was going on, I used Vim to count the number of columns and then corrected the data using a substitution…

Terminology: Macro

In general terms, a macro is a reusable set of instructions. Intermediate and advanced Vim users use “complex repeats” to record typed characters into registers, then play back the register’s contents later on. Most of us refer to complex repeats as macros, but Vim’s documentation calls key…

The Black Hole Register

Once you’ve got used to using the y command to yank text, it's easy to use the unnamed register when perhaps a named…

Vim 101: Registers

It’s possible to use Vim without learning about registers, but to be really productive it’s worth spending some time to understand how actions and commands use them.

There are several groups of registers. Typing help :registers will display these. To see all of the…