Turning off auto indent when pasting text into vim

Question

I am making the effort to learn Vim   When I paste code into my document from the clipboard  I get extra spaces at the start of each new line   line   line     line   I know you can turn off auto indent but I can t get it to work because I have some other settings conflicting or something  which look pretty obvious in my  vimrc but don t seem to matter when I take them out     How do I turn off auto indenting when I paste code but still have vim auto indent when I am writing code   Here is my  vimrc file   set expandtab   set tabstop 2   set shiftwidth 2   set autoindent   set smartindent   set bg dark   set nowrap

User · Answer

Although  pastetoggle or  paste and  nopaste should be working fine  if implemented - they are not always as we can see from the discussion  I highly recomment pasting using the direct approach   p or   p and reading with   r or   r   Vim has acess to ten types of registers   help registers  and the questioner is interested in quotestar and quoteplus from section        Selection and drop registers        and            Use these registers for storing and retrieving the selected text for the GUI     See quotestar and quoteplus   When the clipboard is not available or not    working  the unnamed register is used instead   For Unix systems the clipboard    is only available when the  xterm clipboard feature is present    not in Vi        Note that there is only a distinction between    and    for X11 systems     help x11-selection further clarifies the difference of   and                                                        quoteplus quote        There are three documented X selections  PRIMARY  which is expected to    represent the current visual selection - as in Vim s Visual mode   SECONDARY     which is ill-defined  and CLIPBOARD  which is expected to be used for    cut  copy and paste operations        Of these three  Vim uses PRIMARY when reading and writing the    register     hence when the X11 selections are available  Vim sets a default value for     clipboard  of  autoselect    and CLIPBOARD when reading and writing the       register   Vim does not access the SECONDARY selection       Examples   assuming the default option values          Select an URL in Visual mode in Vim   Go to your browser and click the   middle mouse button in the URL text field   The selected text will be   inserted  hopefully     Note  in Firefox you can set the   middlemouse contentLoadURL preference to true in about config  then the   selected URL will be used when pressing middle mouse button in most places in the window    Select some text in your browser by dragging with the mouse   Go to Vim and   press the middle mouse button  The selected text is inserted    Select some text in Vim and do   y   Go to your browser  select some text in   a textfield by dragging with the mouse   Now use the right mouse button and   select  Paste  from the popup menu   The selected text is overwritten by the   text from Vim    Note that the text in the    register remains available when making a Visual   selection  which makes other text available in the    register   That allows   overwriting selected text

User · Answer

This issue has already been answered  but I though I could also add my own solution  If you simply want to disable auto-indent system wise  for every file type  basically  disable the auto-indent feature completely   you can do the following   Backup the indent vim file  sudo mv  usr share vim vim81 indent vim  usr share vim vim81 indent vim orig Create a new empty indent vim file  sudo touch  usr share vim vim81 indent vim

User · Answer

The following vim plugin handles that automatically through its  quot Bracketed Paste quot  mode  https   github com wincent terminus  Sets up  quot Bracketed Paste quot  mode  which means you can forget about manually setting the  paste  option and simply go ahead and paste in any mode

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The fastest way I   m aware of to quickly go to paste-insert mode for a one-shot paste is tpope   s unimpaired  which features yo and yO  presumably mnemonics for    you open     They   re only documented in his vimdoc  as      A toggle has not been provided for  paste  because the typical use case of   wrapping of a solitary insertion is so wasteful   You toggle twice  but   you only paste once  YOPO    Instead  press yo or yO to invoke o or O with    paste  already set   Leaving insert mode sets  nopaste  automatically

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If you are on a mac  macvim seems to handle it well without having to toggle paste   brew install macvim --override-system-vim

User · Answer

Here is a post by someone who figured out how to remap the paste event to automatically turn paste mode on and then back off  Works for me in tmux iTerm on MacOSX

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If you are working locally  you can paste from the system clipboard with the key sequence     p  This is a proper vim command  so no need to worry about entering an insert mode or switching off autoindent first   Of course if you are working remotely  console over SSH  for example  then this won t work and you should go the  set noai  insert mode  paste into console  leave insertmode   set ai route as described elsewhere

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I am a Python user who sometimes copy and paste into Vim   I switched from Mac to Windows WSL  and this was one of the glitches that bothered me  If you touch a script py and then vi script py  Vi will detect it is a Python script and tried to be helpful  autoindent  paste with extra indents  etc  This won t happen if you don t tell it is a Python script  However  if that is already happening to you  the default autoindent could be a nightmare when you paste already fully indented code  see the tilted ladder shape below   I tried three options and here are the results set paste          works perfect  set noai           still introduced extra whitespace set noautoindent   still introduced extra whitespace

User · Answer

Another way to paste is via  lt C-r gt  in insert mode and dropping the contents of the register  here the global register   See   h i ctrl-r and h i CTRL-R CTRL-O  From the vim help documentation   Insert the contents of a register literally and don t auto-indent  Does the same as pasting with the mouse  Does not replace characters  The     register  last inserted text  is still inserted as typed  not in Vi   So to paste contents into vim without auto indent  use  lt C-r gt  lt C-o gt   in most unix systems  You can add a mapping in the your vimrc inoremap  lt C-r gt   lt C-r gt  lt C-o gt  so you can paste the contents of the   register normally without the auto indent by using  lt C-r gt    Note  this only works if vim is compiled with clipboard

User · Answer

When working inside a terminal the vim-bracketed-paste vim plugin will automatically handle pastes without needing any keystrokes before or after the paste   It works by detecting bracketed paste mode which is an escape sequence sent by  modern  x-term compatible terminals like iTerm2  gnome-terminal  and other terminals using libvte  As an added bonus it works also for tmux sessions  I am using it successfully with iTerm2 on a Mac connecting to a linux server and using tmux

User · Answer

To avoid undesired effects while pasting  there is an option that needs to be set   set paste   A useful command to have in your  vimrc is set pastetoggle  lt F10 gt  or some other button  to easily toggle between paste and nopaste

User · Answer

Please read this article  Toggle auto-indenting for code paste     Some people like the visual feedback shown in the status line by the following alternative for your vimrc    nnoremap  lt F2 gt   set invpaste paste  lt CR gt  set pastetoggle  lt F2 gt  set showmode

User · Answer

I just put set clipboard unnamed in my  vimrc  That makes the default paste buffer map to X s clipboard  So  if I mark a bit of text in a terminal  I can simply press p to paste it in vim  Similarly  I can yank things in vim  e g  YY to yank the current line into the buffer  and middle click in any window to paste it  I don t know  I find it super convenient

User · Answer

I usually use  r  cat and then paste   shift   insert   the content  and CTRL D   No need to enable  amp  disable  direct usage

User · Answer

Native paste   bracketed paste is the best and simplest way since vim 8  released in 2016   It even works over ssh   Bracketed paste works on Linux and Mac  but not Windows Git Bash    Make sure you have vim 8   you don t need the  clipboard or  xterm clipboard options    vim --version   head -1 Simply use the OS native paste command  e g  ctrl shift V or cmd V  in Normal Mode  Do not press i for Insert Mode      Test   Copy  ctrl shift C or cmd C  the output of this  2 lines with a tab indent  to the system clipboard   echo -e   ta n tb  Launch a clean vim 8  with autoindent   vim -u NONE --noplugin -c  set autoindent  Paste from the system clipboard  ctrl shift V or cmd V  in Normal Mode  Do not press i for Insert Mode  The a and b should be aligned with a single tab indent  You can even do this while ssh-ing to a remote machine  the remote machine will need vim 8    Now try the old way  which will autoindent the second line with an extra tab  Press i for Insert Mode  Then paste using ctrl shift V or cmd V  The a and b are misaligned now      Installing Vim 8   Ubuntu 18 04 - comes with Vim 8 by default  Ubuntu 16 04 - install from a PPA   sudo add-apt-repository ppa jonathonf vim sudo apt update sudo apt install vim  Mac  brew install vim

User · Answer

From vim   p  From outside     p or    p

User · Answer

Stick this in your    vimrc and be happy     enables  Paste to just do what you want command Paste execute  set noai   insert   set ai    Edit  on reflection   r  cat is a far better approach since it s short  semantic  and requires no custom vimrc  Use that instead

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Mac users can avoid auto formatting by reading directly from the pasteboard with    r  pbpaste

User · Answer

This works for me   case for   register  what i use like exchange buffer between aps     imap  lt silent gt   lt S-Insert gt   lt C-O gt  set noai lt CR gt  lt C-R gt   lt C-O gt  set ai lt CR gt

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Another answer I did not see until now    se paste noai

User · Answer

Add this to your    vimrc and you will only have to press F2 before and after pasting   set pastetoggle  lt F2 gt

User · Answer

Sadly I found the vim plugin mentioned not to be working with iTerm2 3 0 15  to be fair I don t know if this broke on older versions  - but I found this hack instead   Map command-p to do the paste and using iTerm2 vim keys  Obviously this only works for iTerm2   How it works  I use  jk  to enter escape mode so you will also need    inoremap jk   in your  vimrc   Then it just invokes P to enter paste mode    p to paste from the clipboard and then P to disable paste mode  hth

User · Answer

While setting the paste mode with paste nopaste pastetoggle is perfectly fine  you still have to manually enable paste mode before pasting and disable paste mode after pasting  Being the lazy person that I am  below is the best solution that I ve found so far  which automatically toggles the paste mode when you paste      Here s a little trick that uses terminal s bracketed paste mode to   automatically set unset Vim s paste mode when you paste  Put following   in your  vimrc   let  amp t SI       lt Esc gt   2004h  let  amp t EI       lt Esc gt   2004l   inoremap  lt special gt   lt expr gt   lt Esc gt  200  XTermPasteBegin    function  XTermPasteBegin     set pastetoggle  lt Esc gt  201    set paste   return    endfunction       Now you can paste without explicitly turning paste mode on off - it is   handled automatically for you    Source  Coderwall  Note  This solution doesn t work in WSL  Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux   If anyone has a solution for WSL  please update this answer or add it in the comments   Tmux If using tmux  then the declarations need to be double escaped  The code for this is also in Coderwall

User · Answer

Update  Better answer here  https   stackoverflow com a 38258720 62202  To turn off autoindent when you paste code  there s a special  paste  mode   Type    set paste   Then paste your code   Note that the text in the tooltip now says -- INSERT  paste  --   After you pasted your code  turn off the paste-mode  so that auto-indenting when you type works correctly again    set nopaste   However  I always found that cumbersome   That s why I map  lt F3 gt  such that it can switch between paste and nopaste modes while editing the text   I add this to  vimrc  set pastetoggle  lt F3 gt

[vim] Turning off auto indent when pasting text into vim

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