Understanding Vim Registers

I love learning new things about old tools

Background

I love using command-line tools. I have no idea why I find it so much fun but there you have it. As a result, I like to use terminal-based editors. I settled on Vim a very long time ago. If you want to know why, ask me and I’ll write a short post about my reasoning. I switched to using NeoVim a while back and have never looked back, however, I’m going to be using the term vim to refer to both of them interchangeably.

This is because if you’re handed an out-of-the-box, vanilla instance of them both, very few people will be able to tell the difference between them. Which is good because while I’m virtually guaranteed that any flavor of *nix I might use will have vim installed, the same can’t be said of nvim.

One of the things I like about using vim is that despite using it for decades, I’m always learning new things about it, and I’m somehow always surprised that I never figured it out sooner.

Registers

If you’ve used vim for any amount of time, you’ll probably know that it has registers. A register is a place where vim stores text for later use, e.g., a copy-and-paste buffer. Vim has a lot of registers with a lot of different purposes.