Any way to execute vimscript beside yanking and doing @" on the commandline?

Question

I'm used to just yanking and pasting the register @" into the commandline to execute vimscript, when I'm doing testing experimentation (since it's faster than pasting it into the .vimrc)

Any other ways to execute vimscript?

Answer 1

The :@ command, to run a set of Ex commands, is the most direct one to run a block of Vimscript directly.

There are some limitations, such as you can't define local functions and variables (in the s: namespace.)

Until recently, Vim would break a :@ if line-continuations starting with backslash were used, but that was fixed in version 8.2.0997.

I think my main recommendation here is simply to create a mapping to make it more convenient to use. It's possible to make something more sophisticated that would try to save and restore registers, but there are downsides to that, for example if the Ex block being executed is trying to set the register itself... Furthermore, saving and restoring registers requires running in a function, which means you can't use that mapping to replace the function itself, while it's being executed...

So I'd suggest something fairly simple, just using a named non-default register for the sake of preserving the typical paste from the default register across this operation.

I'd also suggest defining this for filetype Vim only, so in file ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/vim.vim:

xnoremap <buffer> <silent> <Leader>s "sy:@s<CR>

Use a visual selection to pick the block of Vimscript to execute and use <Leader>s to source it.

For completeness, you might want to update the b:undo_ftplugin variable to undo the mapping if you change filetypes:

let b:undo_ftplugin .= '| xunmap <Leader>s'