How can I use yy and p but with dereferenced links?

Question

I already tried a command workaround:

command! cplink cp -rL %d/%f %D

But maybe there is a way to change the default copy behavior?

Answer 1

But maybe there is a way to change the default copy behavior?

Nothing builtin for that. Symlinks are always copied as symlinks. You can try mapping copying like

nnoremap <silent> yd gfyy<c-o>

Where "yd" is for "yank deep". It's not optimal, but seems to work.

Comments

Yes, this would work for how I put the initial question. Maybe I need to explain, where my motivation comes from:
I am often in a situation, where I work with remote machines. Vifm allows for convenient remote connections via sshfs. Typically, on the remote machine I am faced with some kind of "data-versioning-control", i.e. files are neatly sitting in a project folder, but are only represented by symlinks, pointing to some central location with a hash-value naming convention. For instance:
interesting_file.ext -> /path/to/central/folder/46/8a8b8c98f89d8989e
Hence I used the cp -Lr approach to dereference the symbolic link and keep the name of the link-file. Your proposal works fine, however, it will take over the actual file name, which is in this case a hash-value.

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Right, abusing yanking won't work then, but we can try abusing putting instead:

nnoremap <silent> pd :!cp -rL %r" %d<cr>

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This will likely fail if the list of the paths exceeds the maximum supported length of the arguments. Is there any better solution?

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Is there any better solution?

Probably, no, because it needs piping contents of registers (requested here). Although I'm not sure if the limit applies to builtin commands, otherwise a loop can be a workaround (see the linked issue).

Just checked and -L of cp is actually in POSIX, so it can be assumed to be present, and therefore a flag could be added to copy link's destination instead of the link itself.

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There will be :put -deep and :copy -deep in v0.15 (commit).