Is it possible to paste in insert mode in Vim?
11 Answers
If you don't want Vim to mangle formatting in incoming pasted text, you might also want to consider using: :set paste
. This will prevent Vim from re-tabbing your code. When done pasting, :set nopaste
will return to the normal behavior.
It's also possible to toggle the mode with a single key, by adding something like set pastetoggle=<F2>
to your .vimrc. More details on toggling auto-indent are here.
No not directly. What you can do though is quickly exit insert mode for a single normal mode operation with Ctrl-O and then paste from there which will end by putting you back in insert mode.
Key Combo: Ctrl-O p
EDIT: Interesting. It does appear that there is a way as several other people have listed.
While in insert mode, you can use Ctrl-R {register}
, where register can be:
+
for the clipboard,*
for the X clipboard (last selected text in X),"
for the unnamed register (last delete or yank in Vim),- or a number of others (see
:h registers
).
Ctrl-R {register}
inserts the text as if it were typed.
Ctrl-R Ctrl-O {register}
inserts the text with the original indentation.
Ctrl-R Ctrl-P {register}
inserts the text and auto-indents it.
Ctrl-O
can be used to run any normal mode command before returning to insert mode, so Ctrl-O "+p
can also be used, for example.
For more information, view the documentation with :h i_ctrl-r
You can use this to paste from clipboard with Ctrlv:
set pastetoggle=<F10>
inoremap <C-v> <F10><C-r>+<F10>
And this for yanking visual selection into clipboard with Ctrlc:
vnoremap <C-c> "+y
If you also want to use clipboard by default for classic vim yanking/pasting (y/p) in normal mode, here is a config option that does it:
set clipboard=unnamedplus
With this configs you can e.g. yank first in normal mode and then paste with Ctrlv in insert mode. Also, you can paste text from different vim instances and different applications.
Another option is:
set clipboard=unnamed
Then you will be able to just select something by mouse dragging in your X environment and paste it into vim afterwards. But (for some reason) you won't be able to yank something (y) in Vim and shiftinsert it somewhere else afterwards, which is probably quite limiting.
Vim docs about this: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Accessing_the_system_clipboard
For pasting from custom registers you can follow the other answers :). This answer is mainly about integrating Vim with your system clipboard.
Note that for set clipboard=unnamedplus
and set clipboard=unnamed
to work, you need to use gvim or vimx (vim-X11
): Those are compiled with +xterm_clipboard
. You can optionally put this into your .bashrc
to alias vim
with vimx
:
if [ -e /usr/bin/vimx ]; then
alias vim='/usr/bin/vimx'; # vim with +xterm_clipboard
fi
You can find out whether or not your vim has the +xterm_clipboard
in the information provided by vim --version
.