Question

Does anyone know of a way to paste over a visually selected area without having the selection placed in the default register?

I know I can solve the problem by always pasting from an explicit register. But it’s a pain in the neck to type 'xp instead of just p

Answer 1

'{register}p won’t work as you describe. It will replace the selection with the content of the register. You will have instead to do something like:

' I haven't found how to hide this function (yet) function! RestoreRegister()   let @' = s:restore_reg   return '' endfunction  function! s:Repl()     let s:restore_reg = @'     return 'p@=RestoreRegister()\<cr>' endfunction  ' NB: this supports 'rp that replaces the selection by the contents of @r vnoremap <silent> <expr> p <sid>Repl() 

Which should be fine as long as you don’t use a plugin that has a non-nore vmap to p, and that expects a register to be overwritten.

This code is available as a script there. Ingo Karkat also defined a plugin solving the same issue.