How do I get a brief visual flash to confirm what text was just yanked in Neovim?

Explanation

After yanking text in Vim it can be hard to tell exactly what was captured, especially with larger motions or text objects. Neovim's built-in vim.highlight.on_yank() function, triggered via the TextYankPost autocmd, briefly flashes a highlight over the yanked region so you can visually confirm the yank without examining registers.

How it works

Add this to your Neovim config (Lua):

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd('TextYankPost', {
  callback = function()
    vim.highlight.on_yank()
  end,
})

Or with options to customise the highlight group and timeout:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd('TextYankPost', {
  callback = function()
    vim.highlight.on_yank({ higroup = 'IncSearch', timeout = 150 })
  end,
})

The TextYankPost event fires after every yank (and also after d, c, x — any operator that places text in a register), so the flash appears for all register writes, not just explicit y operations.

Example

With the snippet above in your config, pressing yip (yank inner paragraph) will flash the highlighted paragraph for 150ms and then return to normal display — giving you immediate visual feedback.

Tips

• Available options for vim.highlight.on_yank(): higroup (highlight group name, default 'IncSearch'), timeout (milliseconds, default 150), and on_macro (whether to fire inside macros, default false).
• To skip the flash when running macros (which is the default), leave on_macro as false. Set it to true if you want feedback during macro playback.
• This is a Neovim-only feature. For Vim 8, similar behaviour requires a plugin.