Vim's Feature of the Day #1: i_CTRL-R

I'm really astonished of how much there's to learn about Vim and how much you can forget about it, especially because I consider myself a rather power user of my beloved editor.

Digging into my ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/tex.vim I found some mappings that were laying there from quite a while (I think I wrote them something like 4 years ago):

vmap ,b "zdi\textbf{<C-R>z}<ESC>
vmap ,e "zdi\emph{<C-R>z}<ESC>
vmap ,t "zdi\texttt{<C-R>z}<ESC>

Looking at them I went through :help i_CTRL-R ... and it's wonderful! Hitting CTRL-R in insert mode Vim enters in a "waiting for a register name" mode and when received it inserts its content without leaving insert mode.

That's amazingly quick, and I'm already addicted to two combos:

• CTRL-R " which inserts the content of the unnamed register (i.e. the last stuff you yanked/deleted/...). That's interesting since I often end up doing: go somewhere, yank, go somewhere else, enter insert mode, type stuff, exit insert mode, put, re-enter insert mode

• CTRL-R + which inserts the content of the X clipboard, finally an handy way (or better, a way I'm apparently able to remember) to copy stuff from a Gnome application and paste it back in Vim without having to use the "edit" menu