Cut, Copy and Paste in Vim

Cutting, copying, and pasting text is one of the most basic tasks in text editing and we all know Vim has a different way of doing things.

This means until you get a hang of it, you fear it and once you get a grip, it is nothing but a rabbit hole.

While I’ll address cut, copy, and paste in detail, here’s a basic summary of this tutorial to get things started:

Action	Description
`yiw`	Copy the current word.
`yy`	Copy the whole line.
`diw`	Cut the current word.
`dd`	Cut the whole line.
`p`	Paste text.

Don’t worry, Vim gives you much more options than what I’ve mentioned above.

In this tutorial, I will walk you through the following:

How to copy text in Vim
How to cut text in Vim
How to paste text in Vim
How to cut and copy text in Vim using Visual mode

So let’s start with the first one.

How to copy the text in the Vim editor

While we use the term copy, Vim has a different term called yank so from now on, I will be using Yank instead of copy.

As I mentioned earlier, you get multiple ways to yank text in Vim, and here are some useful ones:

Command	Description
`nyy` or `nY`	Yanks (copies) the current line and the next `n-1` lines. For example, `3yy` copies the current line and the two lines below it.
`yaw`	Yanks (copies) the current word the cursor is on.
`yy` or `Y`	Yanks (copies) the entire current line.
`y$`	Yanks (copies) text from the cursor to the end of the line.
`y^` or `y0`	Yanks (copies) text from the cursor to the beginning of the line.

To yank in Vim, follow 3 simple steps:

Press the Esc key to switch to the normal mode
Navigate to a line or a word that you want to copy
Press the relative command from the above table and your text will be copied

Want to learn the interactive way to copy lines? Skip to the last section of this tutorial.

How to cut text in the Vim editor

In Vim, you don’t have any option to delete the text. Instead, you cut the text so you the delete and cut the text are similar things in Vim.

To cut text in Vim, you press the d command. But you never use the d command without any opinions. You always add something to it to get more out of it.

So here are some practical ways you can cut the text using the d command:

Command	Description
`dd`	Cuts the entire current line.
`d$`	Cuts text from the cursor to the end of the line.
`d^` or `d0`	Cuts text from the cursor to the beginning of the line.
`ndd` or `dN`	Cuts the current line and the next `n-1` lines. For example, `3dd` cuts the current line and the two lines below it.
`daw`	Cuts the current word the cursor is on.

Let’s say I want to cut the first 4 lines from my file, then I need to use 4dd and here’s how I did it:

How to paste text in the Vim editor

After copying or cutting text in Vim, you can simply paste it by pressing the p key.

You can press the p key multiple times to paste text multiple times or use np where the n is the number of how many times you want to paste the text.

For example, here, I pasted lines that I copied previously three times: