Improving usage of registers

I use registers regularly in my daily process of working in Vim. Practically everyone does, whether they realize it or not. If you simply yank and paste with yy and p in Vim, you are using a register, specifically the unnamed register.

One challenge I encounter is remembering the names of the various internal registers not to mention remembering what’s stored in them at any given point. To find out what’s stored in each register, simply use Vim’s :registers command, or :reg for short.

But I recently came across the Peekaboo plugin which improves the register experience. Peekaboo will display the registers and their corresponding stored values automatically whenever you use a register: with " and @ in normal mode and with <ctrl-r> in insert mode. It displays this data in a sidebar, with the registers conveniently labeled for their intent: special registers, numbered registers, and named registers. The list allows you to easily choose the register you want to paste from: Pressing " will open the sidebar, then you can glance at what’s available, press the desired register character, such as 4 for the 4th numbered register, then p to paste from that register.

Watch the demo below. I use Peekaboo to quickly view and choose a register to paste from. In our recent tip, Pasting multiple times, we explained how the 0 register contains the last thing yanked. In the demo, you can see this illustrated after I paste over the replacement line.