Is there a way in Vim to paste a line so it pushes the current line down?

Question

The default pasting behavior in vim is to put the line directly below the cursor. Pasting "Line 2" on "Line 1" results like this:

Line 1

Line 2

Line 1
Line 2

Is it possible to paste lines in vim with this result occurring instead?

Line 2
Line 1

Answer 1

I would use the paste before: P (capital P) to paste before the cursor.

If you want the cursor to stay on the original line you could also do: gP

In opposition to paste after: p (small p) to paste after the cursor.

More information with: :help P, :help gP or :help put.

Answer 2

TLDR:

Use P (capital P) instead of p (lowercase p)

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Long Answer:

Looking at the vim help section we can learn a cool few things about the "put" command:

• keymap can be capitalized to put text before the cursor (most keybindings uses this technique, look at o and O)
• you can provide a count (handy to copy multiple times a template)
• you can specify the register it gets its value from (e.g. I use the void buffer "_dP when I need to paste but not yank the value I overwrite)

                        p put E353 E1240
["x]p           Put the text [from register x] after the cursor
            [count] times.

                            P
["x]P           Put the text [from register x] before the cursor
            [count] times.