One of my friends suggested that I start learning vim, and because I have an abundance of time on my hands, I decided I would, and have since enjoyed learning immensly. However, one of the commands I came across that would be useful is yanking or cutting text into registers. The instruction manual said that if I wanted to yank a line into register a, I would just hit ayy. However, this throws me into insert mode at the end of the line and inserts yy. Similarly, b already means something else as well. Did I misunderstand the instructions, or is there an extra step involved. I was fairly certain there are 26 named registers that correspond to letters. Anyway, thanks for any help.

The human mind tends to ignore quotation marks in commands because it looks like the command is being quoted.

You need to type "ayy
Not ayy.

Then to paste, "ap

a on its own of course means append and insert mode.

Hi,

That (ayy) should be "ayy.

To place buffer content (a in this example) before cursor: "aP
To place buffer content after cursor: "ap

BTW: They are called buffers, not registers

Hope this clears things up.

Thank you both. A whole bunch of things just got much easier.