How do I yank all matching lines into one buffer?
VimVim Problem Overview
How do you yank all matching lines into a buffer?
Given a file like:
match 1
skip
skip
match 2
match 3
skip
I want to be able issue a command to yank all lines that match a pattern (/^match/ for this example) into a single buffer so that I can put it into another doc, or into a summary or whatever.
The command should wind up with this in a buffer:
match 1
match 2
match 3
My first thought was to try:
:g/^match/y
But I just get the last match. This makes sense, because the :g command is effectively repeating the y for each matching line.
Perhaps there is a way to append a yank to buffer, rather than overwriting it. I couldn't find it.
Vim Solutions
Solution 1 - Vim
:g/^match/yank A
This runs the global command to yank any line that matches ^match and put it in register a. Because a is uppercase, instead of just setting the register to the value, it will append to it. Since the global command run the command against all matching lines, as a result you will get all lines appended to each other.
What this means is that you probably want to reset the register to an empty string before starting: :let @a="" or qaq (i.e., recording an empty macro).
And naturally, you can use the same with any named register.
Solution 2 - Vim
:help registers
:help quote_alpha
Specify a capital letter as the register name in order to append to it, like :yank A.
Solution 3 - Vim
Oh I just realized after commenting above that it's easy to yank matching lines into a temporary buffer...
:r !grep "pattern" file.txt
The simplest solutions come once you've given up on finding them. :)