Yet simple tool to paste images into markdown files

You are editing a markdown file and have an image on the clipboard and want to paste it into the document as the text ![](img/image1.png). Instead of first copying it to that directory, you want to do it with a single <leader>p key press in Vim. So it hooks <leader>p, checks if you are editing a Markdown file, saves the image from the clipboard to the location img/image1.png, and inserts ![](img/image1.png) into the file.

By default, the location of the saved file (img/image1.png) and the in-text reference (![](img/image1.png) are identical. You can change this behavior by specyfing an absolute path to save the file (let g:mdip_imgdir_absolute = /absolute/path/to/imgdir on linux) and a different path for in-text references (let g:mdip_imgdir_intext = /relative/path/to/imgdir on linux).

Using Vundle

Plugin 'img-paste-devs/img-paste.vim'

Add to .vimrc

autocmd FileType markdown nmap <buffer><silent> <leader>p :call mdip#MarkdownClipboardImage()<CR>
" there are some defaults for image directory and image name, you can change them
" let g:mdip_imgdir = 'img'
" let g:mdip_imgname = 'image'

Simply add a custom paste function that accepts the relative path to the image as an argument, and set g:PasteImageFunction to the name of your function. E.g.

function! g:LatexPasteImage(relpath)
    execute "normal! i\\includegraphics{" . a:relpath . "}\r\\caption{I"
    let ipos = getcurpos()
    execute "normal! a" . "mage}"
    call setpos('.', ipos)
    execute "normal! ve\<C-g>"
endfunction

Then in your .vimrc:

autocmd FileType markdown let g:PasteImageFunction = 'g:MarkdownPasteImage'
autocmd FileType tex let g:PasteImageFunction = 'g:LatexPasteImage'

The former sets the (default) markdown paste function for markdown files, while the latter sets the new latex paste function to be used in latex/tex files. The above LatesPasteImage has already been added to the plugin, see plugin/mdip.vim. Existing paste functions:

Finally, add the file type (e.g. tex) to the first line you added, as

autocmd FileType markdown,tex nmap <buffer><silent> <leader>p :call mdip#MarkdownClipboardImage()<CR>
                        '----'

PRs welcome

This plugin gets clipboard content by running the xclip command.

install xclip first.

I'm not yet perfect at writing vim plugins but I managed to do it. Thanks to Karl Yngve Lervåg and Rich for help on vi.stackexchange.com where they proposed a solution for my use case.