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I observed a difference in behavior between Vim and Neovim: When pasting a :-prefixed command in normal mode, Vim will enter command mode whereas Neovim will enter insert mode. More precisely:

  • Given the selection buffer contents :echo "foo" (e. g. printf ':echo "foo"' |xsel),
  • and Vim/Neovim running in a terminal and currently in normal mode,
  • then when pasting the selection buffer with middle click or <S-Insert>
  • Vim will enter command mode and paste the contents there,
  • Neovim will enter insert mode at the current cursor position and paste the contents there.

(FWIW I have set mouse= in both, but as stated above the behavior is the same using the keyboard. Both Vim and Neovim are in nopaste state.)

I strongly prefer the Vim behavior as there’s more convenient ways of pasting into the buffer. Is there a way to make Neovim behave the same as Vim when pasting?

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    Good question. I'm trying to find which function in vim is called when something is pasted from the outside (with gdb). It's hard cause the paste-related functions in vim and nvim aren't named the same. vim has bracketed_paste (which isn't the one responsible for pasting from the outside, btw); nvim has handle_bracketed_paste.
    – 3N4N
    Sep 13, 2022 at 9:04
  • In theory, NeoVim's behavior is safer. On macOS + Vim, echo ':echo "foo"' | pbcopy, vim, Cmd-V leaves me with the command and a blank line in the buffer and in Normal mode. (This sounds closer to your NeoVim behavior, and may or may not have been affected by bracketed paste.)
    – D. Ben Knoble ♦
    Sep 13, 2022 at 12:22

1 Answer 1

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Instead of using Shift-Insert to insert the marked text, use Vim registers. So first copy your line using a yank command like 0y$ and then use :CTRL-R0 to paste it into the command line.

Note: depending on how you yanked it, you may need to remove the trailing Linefeed. This happens e.g. when using yy to yank a complete line.

See :h c_CTRL-R

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  • That’s an option when your hands are already at the keyboard but as I wrote I’m using the mouse selection as well so your suggestion introduces one more annyoing back-and-forth between mouse and keyboard. In contrast, middle-click paste works consistently pretty much everywhere except Nvim.
    – phg
    Sep 15, 2022 at 9:17
  • Well, first of all, <Shift-Insert> is received by the terminal, so vim/nvim does not know this is a paste action. So you need to disable bracketed paste mode. I don't know how to do this in nvim, for Vim you can set the terminal option t_BE to empty. I don't know nvim enough. And then finally if there is no other way, try to change the way you are yanking and pasting to achieve your goal.
    – Christian Brabandt
    Sep 16, 2022 at 10:22

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