I found this page while looking for a Vim built-in way to paste without moving the cursor.
What I have been doing up until now is these three steps -- which don't require me to remember any new shortcuts:
This leaves your cursor wherever it was before pasting, but is rather annoying needing to hit u Ctrl+R, and it changes the status line to talking about the changes made.
After reading through this page and a couple others, I have updated my ~/.vimrc to include the following:
" Use Shift+P to paste text and leave cursor at the starting position
map P Pg;
This rewrites the Shift+P binding to leave the cursor on the starting position, while keeping p as a shortcut to paste after the cursor while leaving the cursor to the end of the pasted text.
This doesn't require any new learning of commands, and seems to "just work".
Issue with this method:
Trying this method out, the only side-effect I've noticed is that using . to repeat the Shift+P command doesn't use the remapping, so it still moves the cursor to the end of the paste. It's not a big issue, if I want to go down a line pasting items into the same column in each line, I can just turn on Caps Lock and press p without Shift for each line, then turn off Caps Lock again.
Any proper way to work around this issue?