Registers

A register holds text you have yanked or deleted, ready to paste. yumete keeps one unnamed register, any number of named ones, and a history of what the unnamed one held. The system clipboard is separate: it is the + and * registers, and it has its own keys.

The unnamed register

With no register named, these keys use the unnamed one:

Key	Effect
y	yank the selection
d / c	delete / change the selection, keeping what was removed
A-d / A-c	delete / change the selection, leaving the register as it is
p / P	paste after / before the selection; a count (3p) pastes that many copies as one piece
R	replace the selection with the register; 2R replaces it with two copies (helix keymap; under vim, R in Normal mode is vim's replace mode)
C-r " (Insert)	insert the register's text at the cursor

If you would rather d and c left the register alone, :keymap-yumete-flavor on swaps them with A-d and A-c. Set flavor = true under [keys] to make that the default.

Under the vim keymap a paste leaves a cursor, not the pasted text selected. The cursor goes to the last character pasted when the text is part of one line, to the first character pasted when it spans lines, and to the first non-blank of the first pasted line when whole lines were pasted.

With several selections, each yanks its own piece, and pasting into as many selections puts each piece back in its place.

Named registers

Type " and a character before a yank, delete or paste to use that register instead:

• "ay yanks the selection into register a.
• "ap pastes from register a.
• "bd deletes the selection into register b.
• C-r a in Insert mode inserts register a.

Any character can name a register, and three names are special, as in helix and vim:

• _ keeps nothing. "_d deletes without changing what p pastes.
• + and * are the system clipboard. "+y copies the selection out of the editor, and "+p, "+P and "+R paste or replace from it.
• # reads as the selection's number, so "#P with three cursors writes 1, 2 and 3.

Under the vim keymap, "0 holds the last yank, as in vim: a delete fills the unnamed register, and "0p still pastes what you yanked. A delete of a line or more also goes into "1, and the older ones move down to "2 … "9.

Earlier yanks

Every yank or delete into the unnamed register replaces what was there, but the last 16 are kept. Space " or :clipboard opens a picker of everything that can be pasted:

• the system clipboard, first
• the unnamed register's history, newest first, numbered from 0
• the named registers, as "a, "b and so on

Pick one and it is pasted after the selection. The picker's numbers are its own: the row 0 is the newest yank or delete, not the "0 register, which has a row of its own under the named registers.

The system clipboard

Key	Command	Effect
Space y	:clipboard-yank	copy the selection to the system clipboard, and into the unnamed register
Space p	:clipboard-paste	paste from the system clipboard after the selection
Space P		paste from the system clipboard before the selection

Copying uses the terminal's OSC 52 escape, so it works over ssh and inside tmux, if the terminal allows it. Pasting runs pbpaste on macOS, or wl-paste, xclip or xsel on Linux. The terminal's own paste key also works.

Macros are not kept in registers. There is one macro, the last one recorded: Q records and q replays it under the helix keymap, the other way round under vim. A letter after q does not name a register.