Caterpillar Vims Software

[Suyay Escarsega]

Isit possible to copy to clipboard directly from Vim? yy only copies stuff to Vim's internal buffer. I want to copy to the OS's clipboard. Is there any such command in Vim or you can only yank stuff within Vim?

In Linux distros you have to install vim-gtk (aka gvim) first to gain clipboard functionality. This is because non-gtk vim is typically compiled without X11 support. This is to allow it to run on console only machines (often servers).

And for those confused about how to use registers when yanking or putting, you merely write " then the name of the register. So for copying something to the clipboard register you type "*y and then to put you type "*p (credit: Kyle Mathews)

@Jacob Dalton has mentioned this in a comment, but nobody seems to have mentioned in an answer that vim has to be compiled with clipboard support for any of the suggestions mentioned here to work. Mine wasn't configured that way on Mac OS X by default and I had to rebuild vim. Use this the command to find out whether you have it or not vim --version grep 'clipboard'. +clipboard means you're good and the suggestions here will work for you, while -clipboard means you have to recompile and rebuild vim.

I was never satisfied with set clipboard method for years. The biggest drawback is it will mess up your clipboard history, even when you use x for deletion. Here is a better and more elegant solution.

If this does not work, check if your installed version maybe has the clipboard feature not enabled. When this answer was written (2019), the default vim shipped with macOS did not come with clipboard option enabled. You need that option to access the system clipboard.

If your vim happens to be compiled without +xterm_clipboard option like it is by default in Debian and I guess Ubuntu, you can pipe selection or entire buffer to external program that handles desktop clipboard. For xclip (which you may need to install previously), the command will be :w !xclip -sel clip

:call system() runs a terminal command. It takes two arguments, the first the command, the second what to pipe to that command. For example :echom system("head -1", "Hello\nWorld") returns Hello (With some padding). echom returns the output of a command, call doesn't.

Maybe someone will find it useful. I wanted to stay independent from X clipboard, and still be able to copy and paste some text between two running vims. This little code save the selected text in temp.txt file for copying. Put the code below into your .vimrc. Use CTRL-c CTRL-v to do the job.

In case you don't want to use any graphical interface for vim and you prefer to just stick with terminal emulator there may be a much simpler approach to this problem. Instead of using yank or anything like this, first take a look at documentation of terminal you use. I've been struggling with the same issue (trying to use +clipboard and xclip and so on) and in the end it turned out that in my terminal emulator it's enough to just press shift and select any text you want to copy. That's it. Quite simple and no need for messing with configuration. (I use urxvt by the way).

I wrote a simple line in my .vimrc to get copy working. Hope this helps someone. My vim is not installed with Clipboard support, unfortunately, so none of these suggestions worked for me. Basically, paste this line in your .vimrc:

3a8082e126