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I am going to be pasting a lot of characters into a file. Each time I paste something, the pasted element will need to be wrapped in quotes and followed by a comma. Is there a way to automatically wrap these characters after each paste in vim? The paste will be coming from the system clipboard, not a vim paste buffer.
For example, say the system clipboard contains a, when pasting this into vim using a middle-click, I would like it to insert "a",.
Do you need to use the mouse (middle-klick)? I'd go for a macro:
Then, each time you want to paste that way, simply hit @q.
Note: If you're on X, you might need to use "+ instead of "*, dpending on which clipboard you really want to use. See :h x11-selection.
Note2: This pastes before your cursor. Change the first i to a to paste after your cursor.
@@ from the 2nd time on.
Assuming your vim includes clipboard support (:version shows +clipboard) and you intend to do this in more than one editing session, I would recommend creating a mapping that does this for you:
nnoremap <F5> i"",<Esc>h"+P
<F5>: what you'll hit to trigger the mapping. Could be any combination of keys.
i"",<Esc>: "", and escape insert mode.
h: move the cursor left 1 character.
"+P: paste from the system clipboard before the current character. If pasting via middle-click, you'd want "*P instead
This is currently formulated to work when in normal mode, but could work in insert mode by removing the leading i (and perhaps adding one at the end)
My UnconditionalPaste plugin provides a g,"p mapping that pastes each line in the register (prepend "+ for the system clipboard, as usual) surrounded by double quotes and delimited by commas, all in one line. This is just one particular variant from a plethora of similar mappings; some even query for the separator.
