I'm sorry for the confusion. There are two ways it can be faster. The way you understood it, I guess, is in typing. The difference here is: i Ctrl v Esc vs

I'm sorry for the confusion. There are two ways it can be faster. The way you understood it, I guess, is in typing. The difference here is: i Ctrl v Esc vs (Shift) " * p Where, on my keyboard, both " and * requires the shift key, but YMMV. What I meant, though, is the actual input of text. When pasting with Ctrl+V, that's like one character at a time for Vim, and that's visible, so if you paste a large body of text you can actually see it scrolling past. When working with buffer commands, it works just any other internal Vim buffer operation, which is instantaneous.