Odi's astoundingly incomplete notes

I often copy text files via SSH by just opening the target file in vim and then pasting the text into the terminal.

• Ctrl-A Ctrl-C
• ssh targethost
• vim targetfile
• gg  (top of file)
• dG (delete to end of file)
• :set paste (no auto indent)
• i (insert)
• Shfit-Ctrl-V

If the file is quite large, this is very slow and if the target machine is close enough you can hear its hard drive going mad.

So what's going on here? vim is writing to its swap file. Character by character. Dutifully flushing each character out of the buffers. Very good in case you lose power, except that it really slows us down here...

Simple solution: disable vim's swap file with the -n option.

vim -n targetfile


posted on 2013-11-12 21:23 UTC in Code | 0 comments | permalink