How to paste yanked text into the Vim command line

For pasting something from the system clipboard into the Vim command line ("command mode"), use Ctrl+R followed by +. For me, at least on Ubuntu, Shift+Ins is not working.

PS: I am not sure why Ctrl+R followed by *, which is theoretically the same as Ctrl+R followed by + doesn't seem to work always. I searched and discovered the + version and it seems to work always, at least on my box.

It's worth noting also that the yank registers are the same as the macro buffers. In other words, you can simply write out your whole command in your document (including your pasted snippet), then "by to yank it to the b register, and then run it with @b.

1. "[a-z]y: Copy text to the [a-z] register

2. Use :! to go to the edit command

3. Ctrl + R: Follow the register identity to paste what you copy.

It used to CentOS 7.

If you have two values yanked into two different registers (for example register a and register b) then you can simply set a variable c and do the operation on it.

For example, :set c = str2float(@a) + str2float(@b) and then you can paste the content of c anywhere.

For example whilst in INSERT mode, CTRL + R then type = to enter into the expression register and just type c after equal sign and hit ENTER. Done you should now have the total of a and b registers.

All these can be recorded in a macro and repeated over!

The str2float function is used if you are working with floats, if you don't, you will get integers instead.

I am not sure if this is idiomatic but it worked for my case where I needed to add 2 numbers in a row and repeat it for 500 more lines.

I like to use Control-v to paste from the system clipboard, so I use:

cnoremap <C-v> <C-r>+