Question

I don’t have a huge amount of experience using VI. I am running it on Mac OSX.

I’ve copied and pasted text before in the editor using (when I say gui in the following I mean the Mac OSX gui)

1. Cursor to highlight and copy i using command C or the gui or the yy command in VI.
2. Entering insert mode where I want to paste the text and then pasting using command V or the gui

My problem is that a very long line that is split over multiple lines in the terminal becomes multiple lines as shown on the terminal when copied and pasted by any of the methods.

How do I get it to copy and paste excatly as is?

Answer 1

You have

 :set paste

Put Vim in Paste mode. This is useful if you want to cut or copy
some text from one window and paste it in Vim. This will avoid
unexpected effects.
Setting this option is useful when using Vim in a terminal, where Vim
cannot distinguish between typed text and pasted text.