5

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?

1 Answer 1

3

y

Then change to your other buffer, and

p

5
  • 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, 2011 at 23:18
  • 1
    @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, 2011 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, 2011 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, 2011 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, 2011 at 18:21

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