How to stop (neo)vim from yanking text on pasting over selection?

Question

I want to make Neovim stop yanking the text I paste over into my register (mapped to system clipboard with vim.opt.clipboard = 'unnamedplus'), eg

If I have the text:

asdfghjkl
asdfghjkl
asdfghjkl

and I v over 'sdfgh', hit y, then go to the second line and v over 'as' and hit paste it will copy 'as' to my clipboard, I want it to keep 'sdfgh' instead

Answer 1

Just use P instead of p in visual mode. This will preserve the register.

To make this default, you can use a map such as

xnoremap p P

Answer 2

If you are using lua, update your keymaps.lua file to include:

-- mode
--  "n" - normal mode
--  "i" - insert mode
--  "v" - visual mode

local function map(m, k, v)
    vim.keymap.set(m, k, v, { silent = true })
end

map("v", "p", "P", { noremap = true, silent = true })

This remaps p, which yanks text on paste with P, which doesn't yank text on paste.