Kill Ring for VSCode & VSCodeVim

Emacs-style kill-ring for VSCode that is designed to work with VSCodeVim.

Paste the most recent thing you copied with p, and — immediately after — cycle backward and forward through your clipboard history with [p / ]p to correct the paste in place. It is the emacs yank / yank-pop workflow, wired for vim keybindings.

What it does

• Every copy/cut/yank (from vim, from VSCode, or from any other application) is captured into a ring of recent entries.
• p / P paste the current ring entry.
• Right after a paste, [p walks to older entries and ]p walks back toward newer ones, replacing the just-pasted text each time. This lets you "fix" a paste without deleting and re-pasting.
• A picker (killring.showRing, bound to Alt+Y by default) lists the whole ring so you can jump straight to any entry.

Requirements

This extension captures whatever lands on the system clipboard. For your vim yanks and cuts to be captured, VSCodeVim must route the unnamed register through the system clipboard:

// settings.json
"vim.useSystemClipboard": true

Setup with VSCodeVim

An extension cannot inject bindings into vim.normalModeKeyBindings, so add the recommended wiring to your own settings.json. Paste (p/P) stays native so vim keeps its linewise/charwise behavior; you only bind the cycle chords:

// settings.json
"vim.normalModeKeyBindings": [
  { "before": ["[", "p"], "commands": ["killring.pastePop"] },
  { "before": ["]", "p"], "commands": ["killring.pastePopNext"] }
]

[p / ]p only do anything while the cursor is still inside the text you just pasted; anywhere else they are no-ops (they will not shadow other bindings).

Rebinding

The commands are plain VSCode commands, so bind them however you like:

How capture works

VSCode has no "clipboard changed" event, so the ring is filled two ways:

1. Polling the clipboard on a timer (killring.pollInterval, default 250ms) — this catches copies you stage but never paste, and copies made in other apps.
2. Lazy ingest at paste time — guarantees the value you are about to paste is in the ring.

Together these mean anything you copy is remembered, whether or not you ever paste it. (The only theoretical gap is two distinct copies made within a single poll interval that are both never pasted.)

Settings

Behavior notes

• Pointer semantics match emacs: a fresh copy resets to the newest entry; a plain p pastes from wherever the pointer is; popping moves the pointer and wraps at the ends. So after popping to an older entry (without copying anything new), the next p repeats that older entry.
• Consecutive duplicates are collapsed — copying the same text twice in a row does not create two entries.
• Linewise vs charwise: paste is native vim, so linewise/charwise behavior is exactly vim's. When you cycle with [p/]p, the replacement mirrors the newline shape of the paste it replaces, so a linewise paste stays linewise as you cycle.

How paste-pop works

Paste (p/P) is left to native VSCodeVim — the system clipboard loses vim's linewise/charwise register mode, so only vim can paste it correctly. The extension observes the last single-insertion edit; when you press [p/]p while the cursor is still inside that inserted text, it confirms the text was a paste of the current ring entry and swaps it for the previous/next entry.

Known limitations (v1)

• Paste-pop only follows a plain p/P. Because paste is native, 3p and .-repeat work normally — but a multi-insertion paste (a blockwise Ctrl-v paste, or a counted 3p) produces several edits at once, which the observer skips; those can be pasted but not cycled.
• Paste-pop starts only while the cursor is still inside the just-pasted text; move away and [p/]p become no-ops.
• Visual-mode and insert-mode pastes are left to native vim/VSCode; the ring still captures their clipboard effects, but [p/]p only correct a normal-mode paste.
• The ring is in-memory only — it is not persisted across restarts and is not shared live between windows.

License

MIT