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Say I want to search for multiple lines (or do anything with them in the command line).
I yank some lines and enter search mode (/).
I press Ctrl + r" to paste what I just yanked, but I get ^M for the line breaks so the search is unsuccessful unless I change the ^M to \n.
This is on ubuntu using awesomewm and st terminal. I suspect it could be an issue with my terminal as opposed to vim.
Here is a gif illustrating this:
You can edit the contents of the register like this to escape the newlines:
:let @0=substitute(@0, '\n', '\\n', 'g')
And then just do your command like normal using Ctrl-R.
I rarely run into this use case so I guess this is good enough, but I still don't understand why vim behaves like this so would be great if someone else has a better solution.
You could add this to a function in your vimrc to do the substitution and then search if you liked, but I prefer not to add too much custom stuff so that when I log onto other systems I don't need to depend on having my vimrc.