Explaining Null Device or Black Hole Register in Vim

The aim of this page📝 is to explain the concept of registers in Vim, particularly the black hole register, and its comparison to /dev/null in Bash. I am solving an incident where our design has something similar in event streaming context — we have a stream that works like a null device and we write data there in when it has to be written but it is just to discard it. In general, this is known as null device

• Vim has a special register called the black hole register.
• The black hole register discards data without storing it.
• Use _ (underscore) to specify the black hole register.
• Example commands: "_d (delete without storing), "_x (delete character) or "_C" to change the whole line without yanking its contents to a register
• This concept is similar to redirecting to /dev/null in Bash.
• /dev/null discards data without saving it.

Example in Bash:

echo "This won't be seen" > /dev/null

Example in Vim:

"_d
"_x
"_C

LINKS

• https://vimhelp.org/change.txt.html#copy-move
• https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/dev-null-in-linux
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dev/null