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VIM - Vi IMproved @lemmy.sdf.org paequ2 @lemmy.today 2mo ago

PSA: How to paste large amounts of text in Vim

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18258561/pasting-a-huge-amount-of-text-into-vim-is-slow/79633075

I recently ran into this. I didn't realize that the swpfile slowed down pastes.

I was trying to paste 50kb of text in Vim, but it kept getting stuck and I had to kill -9 it.

But, then I ran :set noswapfile and the paste was instant! TIL!

6 comments

Save it in a text file in the same directory. Then open the file you want put it in with vim. Move the cursor to the spot in the file you want to paste the text. Hit Esc then : and type r!cat (the file name you saved and want to paste the data from) , press enter.

This will read in the other file and put the contents into the one you have open in vim.
- you can just do :r path/to/file directly
- What is the benefit of involving cat?
  
  Just a habit, because you can run any command and get the stdout into vim in that method. Like for getting your shebang or an ls listing.
Thank you so much for sharing it, I didn't know either!

6 comments