vi - vim toggling buffer overwrite behavior when deleting

Question

Vim is great, but like many people I get really annoyed when I want to copy, delete, then paste -- the yank buffer gets overwritten by the delete action.

Now I know there are 101 work-arounds and mappings, some of which are enumerated in posts like this one: Any way to delete in vim without overwriting your last yank?

But all of these solutions have drawbacks -- even I were a buffer-guru (which I'm not). For instance, excess keystrokes -- whereas I normally xxxx to quickly delete 4 characters (just one keystroke cuz I hold it down and wait for autorepeat), it is not practical for me to now switch to ,x,x,x,x or whatever mapping I have to use a different buffer.

What would really be ideal is simply a mode toggle, whereby you can toggle on and off the side-effect behavior of the D, d, X, and x keys so that they alternately do or do not also write their text to a buffer. That way I can simply enter the "no side-effect" mode and delete away to heart's content, then paste when I'm ready. And re-enable side-effects if desired.

Does anyone know a way to do this?

[UPDATE: SOLUTION] OK I got it: I wrote a function that toggles a "no side-effects" mode... works perfectly! See my accepted correct answer below

[UPDATE #2] My solution still works great and I use it all the time when I'm doing a lot of deleting and pasting. But meanwhile I also found a lighter way to meet the specific use-case of copy, paste, delete for simple cases where the text to delete is contiguous.

After yanking text normally, I then visually highlight the text to delete using the v command, and then simply paste over it with the p command. That achieves the desired effect without any special mapping.

Only problem with this workflow is that if I wanted to paste again, the original paste buffer is overwritten by the act of pasting over the highlighted text, but this behavior is easily changed with the following mapping in .vimrc:

vnoremap p "_dp
vnoremap P "_dP

Answer 1

OK, I got it -- this script in .vimrc lets me effectively toggle a "no buffer side-effects" mode whereby the d and x keys no longer overwrite the buffer when "no buffer side-effects" mode is activated.

Add this in .vimrc

function! ToggleSideEffects()
    if mapcheck("dd", "n") == ""
        noremap dd "_dd
        noremap D "_D
        noremap d "_d
        noremap X "_X
        noremap x "_x
        echo 'side effects off'
    else
        unmap dd
        unmap D
        unmap d
        unmap X
        unmap x
        echo 'side effects on'
    endif
endfunction
nnoremap ,, :call ToggleSideEffects()<CR>

Then to toggle in and out of this mode use the key combination ,, (two commas)