Vim 101: Pasting Into Command-line Mode

There are times when you’re tempted to lift your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, idly wondering if there’s a better way. One such case is taking text from a buffer and placing it into Command-line mode. For example, performing text substitution with %s, or invoking a shell command with :!. Many Vim users will reach for the mouse and use the operating system's copy and paste feature to do this, but there's a quicker way provided by Vim's registers.

The CTRL-R (:help i_CTRL-R) command can insert the contents of a register in Insert or Replace mode. This is known as a "special key" (:help ins-special-keys). The great thing about this shortcut is you can reuse it to put registers into Command-line mode. For example, let's say you've got some text you want to search for in a buffer. First yank the text into a register, and then paste it with CTRL-R:

• In Normal mode, type "ayw to yank a word
• Press escape, and then / to search
• Then press CTRL-R and a to put register a

A shorter way to do this is to use the default register. Typing yw will yank up to the word boundary into the default register, and then typing CTRL-R_" will put it into the command-line. It's worth practicing using this, particularly if you haven't got used to working with registers yet.