Use motion when putting

Question

A very common use case I'm having is to copy something (let's say a word) and I want to paste it in another context (let's say a word with quotes). The way I do it is:

const char *foobar(void) {
    return "barfoo";
}

there, as my cursor is on foobar:

const char *foo|bar(void) {

I could do something like:

yiw

to copy content. Then:

j

to move within the returned string:

    return "bar|foo";

And then I should do:

vi"p

to paste foobar within the quotes:

    return "foobar|";

My question is whether there's a way to use a motion to put, the same way it is possible to yank, what I'd love to do is something like:

pi"

which obviously wouldn't work. I find it feels weird to have to use a visual to apply a paste within a motion, but everybody I asked told me it's not possible. If it is indeed not, what would be the rationale of having the action put not accepting a motion‽

Answer 1

Well, assuming pi" would work, it would then mean that you will need at least 2 chars to simply put at cursor position - you can't simply use p by itself! (which is, after all, the most often used paste operation). With yank, it's clear you have to copy "something", so there is an asymmetry between the two.

BTW, with Kana's operator replace, you can simply do something like _i" to replace text with previous yanked text from default register. Or __ to replace a line (assuming you mapped _ as the docs suggest).