Does anyone know of a way to paste over a visually selected area without having the selection placed in the default register?
I know I can solve the problem by always pasting from an explicit register. But it's a pain in the neck to type "xp instead of just p
"{register}p won't work as you describe. It will replace the selection with the content of the register. You will have instead to do something like:
" I haven't found how to hide this function (yet)
function! RestoreRegister()
let @" = s:restore_reg
return ''
endfunction
function! s:Repl()
let s:restore_reg = @"
return "p@=RestoreRegister()\<cr>"
endfunction
" NB: this supports "rp that replaces the selection by the contents of @r
vnoremap <silent> <expr> p <sid>Repl()
Which should be fine as long as you don't use a plugin that has a non-nore vmap to p, and that expects a register to be overwritten.
This code is available as a script there. Ingo Karkat also defined a plugin solving the same issue.