vim: Change default paste register

Question

When I yank or delete text in vim, and run `:reg`, I see that it's going in to register `"`. But when I paste, I see "E353: Nothing in register: *" What I get out of this is that vim is yanking to `"` but pasting from `*`. `:set clipboard?` \ `clipboard=` `:echo version` \ `704` Is it possible to change the register that vim attempts to yank from? Or am I asking the wrong question? EDIT: To yank, I use `yy` (or `dd` or `ci'` etc).

Accepted Answer

You can't change the default register: it will always be the unnamed register, `"`.

What you can do, though, is synchronize the unnamed register with the clipboard register:

```
set clipboard^=unnamed
```

See `:help 'clipboard'`.

For reference…

Vim's documentation generally advises to add your custom values to the default ones rather than overriding them. You can do that with `+=` to append or `^=` to prepend. On Windows or Mac OS X, the default value of `clipboard` is empty so `set clipboard=unnamed` could be enough but the default value on Linux doesn't accept anything after its last entry so `unnamed` must be prepended. `set clipboard^=unnamed` is a safer, cross-platform, choice:

```
:set clipboard^=unnamed
:set clipboard?

Linux:    unnamed,autoselect,exclude:cons\|linux
Mac OS X: unnamed
Windows:  unnamed
```

vim: Change default paste register

Solution

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