[SOLVED] vim: newlines when pasting block selection

Question

Hi there!
When pasting a block selection im Vim, the pasted lines are added to the existing lines. That definitely has it's uses, but usually I'd like to paste the lines onto blank lines. For this, I first have to generate a buch of empty lines, and only then can I paste the block. Is there a way to automatically generate new lines when pasting blocks?
Here's a small example in Fortran. I'd like to get the list of REALs by block-selecting the variables and copying them between the REAL and the INTEGER block.
REAL :: &
real1 (2,2) , &
real2 (5,2) , &
real3 (1,2)
INTEGER :: &
int1 ,&
int2
If I just block-select it and paste it onto the line between the REAL and INTEGER blocks, I end up with this:
REAL :: &
real1 (2,2) , &
real2 (5,2) , &
real3 (1,2)
real1
real2INTEGER :: &
real3 int1 ,&
int2
What I'd like to end up with, though, is this:
REAL :: &
real1 (2,2) , &
real2 (5,2) , &
real3 (1,2)
real1
real2
real3
INTEGER :: &
int1 ,&
int2
Without manually inserting blank lines, that is!
PS: I'm not really sure whether that's the correct subforum, but as the questions mostly addresses Programmers/Coders, I guess it should be fine here.
Last edited by cryptkeeper (2013-11-07 08:16:32)

Answer 1

karol wrote:http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Unconditional … wise_paste
'\cp' seems to do what you want.
I haven't tried it yet, but it looks exactly what I need! What I do after pasting the selected block is often joining the lines to a single line with the variables delimited by commas or \\|| (for further use in vim regexes), and it looks like this plugin can do exactly this.
Thanks! I'll mark it SOLVED then (and hope I'll get around to actually try it soon enough).
Trilby wrote:Karol's answer seems like a more direct solution, but I'd personally go with a combination of simpler commands like "3yy3jPw Ctrl-v 3j$d"
The problem with this is that you know the exact number of lines, i.e. 3 in this case, which is usually not the case in the code I work with as the variable lists are much longer.
But what I've become accustomed to in the meantime is memorizing the number of lines that vim shows when I yank the block and inserting that number of new lines before pasting, e.g. for a 24 line block
24o<ESC>j
24k
p
I doubt that using 24o<ESC>j is the best way to insert the 24 blank lines, but it works well enough.