PSA: How to paste large amounts of text in Vim (lemmy.today)

submitted 1 year ago by paequ2@lemmy.today to c/vim@lemmy.sdf.org

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https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18258561/pasting-a-huge-amount-of-text-into-vim-is-slow/79633075

I recently ran into this. I didn't realize that the swpfile slowed down pastes.

I was trying to paste 50kb of text in Vim, but it kept getting stuck and I had to kill -9 it.

But, then I ran :set noswapfile and the paste was instant! TIL!

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[-] Penguincoder@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Just a habit, because you can run any command and get the stdout into vim in that method. Like for getting your shebang or an ls listing.

[-] korthrun@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Then for the casual reader: don't pick this habit up. There's no reason to fork/exec a shell, invoke cat for the purpose of printing to stdout, then move the data into your buffer. You can just do :r somefile.txt.

this post was submitted on 22 May 2025

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