Speed up pasting into vim

clipboardvim

I copied a part of the HTML out of a web page and wanted to save it in a file.
For that I started a new vim session in a terminal window, with a (new) filename specified on the commandline, hit i to get to insert mode and then CtrlShift+V and waited while [-- INSERT --] showed at the bottom and waited…

As vim was non-responsive after several seconds, I opened 'Text Editor' from the Applications→Accessoiries menu pasted the text (which showed up within a fraction of a second, saved it under a new name, closed, and killed the Vim session that still was not done, 1.5 minutes later.
The amount of text was 186K in 3200 lines, not excessive I would say, nor with overly long lines.

Is there a way to speed up these kind of insertions in vim and/or is there an explanation why this is so slow compared to using the, otherwise horrible and mouse oriented, Text Editor?

(The %CPU according to top doesn't come above 5%, although I have some processors free in the system, so it might be some I/O bound problem, that doesn't exist when reading the same text from a file)

Version info:
Ubuntu 12.04
Vim: 7.3, with patches as supplied by Ubuntu 12.04
bash: 4.2.25
gnome-terminal: 3.4.1.1

Best Answer

To save a lot of clipboard text to file quickly, you can run cat > file.txt, paste the contents, then press Ctrl-d.

If you have xsel installed, you can do :r !xsel to insert the "primary" (aka. "mouse") selection in Vim, or :r !xsel -b to insert the "clipboard" (Ctrl-c) buffer. You can also save the selection directly to a file with xsel >file.txt or xsel -b >file.txt. This removes the need for separate pasting + EOF actions, and avoids printing the entire copy buffer in the terminal.

If you have no xsel but xclip, the corresponding commands are xclip -out for the primary selection, or xclip -out -selection clipboard for the clipboard buffer.

Related Solutions

Cursor position after pasting in vi / vim

In vim, use gp and gP instead of p and P to leave the cursor after the pasted text. If you want to swap the bindings, put the following lines in your .vimrc:

noremap p gp
noremap P gP
noremap gp p
noremap gP P

Strangely, in vim, p and P leave the cursor on the last pasted character for a character buffer, even in compatible mode.

I don't know how to change this in other vi versions.

How to make Shift+Insert paste selection after closing window with selection

Unix have two main "clipboards", the PRIMARY and the CLIPBOARD.More info in wikipedia the PRIMARY is the "select and paste with the mouse middle click" X11 style and the CLIPBOARD is the traditional copy&paste. Every time you select a text, the PRIMARY gets that text and it its lost when the text stop being selected. This is useful, but require training, as other systems don't require the selection to be active, people are used to click around before pasting and any click will lose the selection.

So what you want is the CLIPBOARD copy&paste that stays until a new CLIPBOARD is loaded. The main problem is that when you are going to do the paste, you may get the PRIMARY or the CLIPBOARD content, depending of the app and the way you use it.

fear not, there are many apps that solve this confusion, by synchronizing both PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD and even having a history, a huge help to manage copy&pastes.

There are many tools, like the Klipper and Glipper for kde and gnome, but many others for other WM and most of then are WM independent. I use parcellite, as its simple and works fine. Check here for many alternatives.

You can also search the net for "clipboard manager" for more info and apps

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Cursor position after pasting in vi / vim

How to make Shift+Insert paste selection after closing window with selection

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