'pasting with overwrite by motion in vim

Consider the following, frequent situation.

do_something("argument to use");
do_something_else("here I want the same argument es above");

I have copied the second line from somewhere else. But it has the wrong argument. I want to have it the same argument as the line above. So I move up there to the a of argument… and press in normal mode yt" (=yank till "). This copies everything within and excluding the quotes. Then I move one line down to the h of here… where I want to replace everything within these quotes with what I have just copied, something like rt" (=replace till ") but r is already used to replace a single character. Is that possible?

PS: I know in this case I could just copy the first line and add the _else to do_something. But this is just an example and I somehow can't believe there is no way to do it like I described in vim.

vim


Solution 1:[1]

You can do this using visual mode. When your cursor is on the h, simply press:

vt"p
  • v enables visual mode.
  • t" will move your cursor to right before the " and select everything on its way.
  • p will paste over the selected text.

Solution 2:[2]

I need this so often, I wrote a plugin to simplify and allow maximum speed: ReplaceWithRegister.

This plugin offers a two-in-one gr command that replaces text covered by a {motion} / text object, entire line(s) or the current selection with the contents of a register; the old text is deleted into the black-hole register, i.e. it's gone. It transparently handles many corner cases and allows for a quick repeat via the standard . command. Should you not like it, its page has links to alternatives.

Solution 3:[3]

As an alternative to the visual mode solution, you could use the black hole register to delete the text on the second line before pasting the correct version.

"_di"P
  • "_di" delete between the "" (same as "_dt" if you are at the start of the quote)
  • P the above leaves the cursor over the closing " so paste the text before the cursor.

Solution 4:[4]

you can also use c{motion} and then in insert mode use CTRL-R0 to paste the last yanked content.

ci"<C-R>0
  • ci" deletes between "" and then goes to inesrt mode
  • <C-R>{register} will paste the content content in register {register} in the current cursur position in insert mode, and the 0 register contains the result of the most recent yank command (:h "0).

i've found this solution easier to hit than "_di"P, while still enabling pasting multiple times.

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Sander Vanhove
Solution 2 Ingo Karkat
Solution 3 Holloway
Solution 4 Bar Tzadok

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