Vim: yank highlighted text

Question

I have a pattern highlighted and I want to copy all the text highlighted and paste it into another buffer. How can I do that?

Kromey · Answer 1 · 2011-05-25 22:46:35Z

up vote 1 down vote

y

Then change to your other buffer, and

p

answered May 25 '11 at 22:46

Kromey
1,458412

	Maybe I'm doing something wrong. When I do the above, the entire line get yanked and i want to copy only the highlighted text. – Nahuel May 25 '11 at 23:18
	@Nahuel: Make sure you use a lower-case `y` to yank the text. An upper-case `Y` will yank the entire line. That's if you used `v` or the mouse to highlight the text. If you searched for that text using a pattern, you can yank the matched text with `y//e`. – garyjohn May 26 '11 at 0:24
	@garyjohn Yes I'm doing a pattern search and then working with the results. This time I did yank the highlighted with `y//e` but only the first match. Can i yank all the words matched at the same time and then paste them, for example, at the end of the file? – Nahuel May 26 '11 at 1:35
	@Nahuel: I can't think of an easy way to do that. You could append each match to the `a` register, for example, by prefixing the yank with `"A`, but you'd have to type `"Ay//e` at each match. The only way I can think of to yank all the matches with one command would be to write a script. – garyjohn May 26 '11 at 2:46
	Not exactly what you are looking for but I will typically use the global commands for this... Basically do :v/pattern/d that will get rid of all non matching lines... then I will yank the remaining lines into the new buffer and undo my previous command... Usually at that point the results are closer to what I want and fairly easy to manipulate further to get the desired results. Hope this helps. – Neg_EV Jun 20 '11 at 18:21

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