How to configure vim to use the mouse, AND to copy and paste
Alexander Dietz
I have questions regarding vim and how to enable the mouse in it. There were some other threads about that issue, but I could not find a solution for my problem.
I would like to have the following actions enabled in vim:
1. To go to some place, I click the left mouse key
2. To copy text TO the vim editor by using the middle-click of the mouse, (text which I have marked before in some other window (browser, emacs, xterm))
3. To copy text FROM the vim editor, by selecting the text with the left mouse button (left-click, hold down, select text, release left button), so I can paste it to somwehere else with the mouse middle button
4. To copy text and paste TO and FROM vim
I have the following content of my .vimrc:
:set mouse=r
:set selectmode+=mouse
With that configuration, the points 2-4 are working.
When I change mouse=r to mouse=a, then points 1 AND 3 are working, but I have to press the shift key in addition. But I cannot use the mouse to go somewhere else in vim.
A suggestion was to use mouse=ar, but this enable only the first point.
So how is it possible to configure vim to use all four points 1-4?
Thanks
Alex
Ven Tadipatri
visual mode to copy and paste.
But if you use xclip to copy, and ctrl+shift+v to paste, then setting
mouse=a, you can get all the functionality you want. It does take some
getting used to probably, since you can't use the middle mouse button
to paste.
If you can find a way to copy that's not as messy as putting this
in your .vimrc, please let me know:
vmap <C-c> :<Esc>`>a<CR><Esc>mx`<i<CR><Esc>my'xk$v'y!xclip -selection c<CR>u
Thanks,
Ven
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Alexander Dietz
first of all thanks for a reply, although it does not answer all of my question.
Well, this doesn't answer the question I asked earlier about using
visual mode to copy and paste.
But if you use xclip to copy,
(what is xclip???)
and ctrl+shift+v to paste, then setting
mouse=a, you can get all the functionality you want. It does take some
getting used to probably, since you can't use the middle mouse button
to paste.
If you can find a way to copy that's not as messy as putting this
in your .vimrc, please let me know:
vmap <C-c> :<Esc>`>a<CR><Esc>mx`<i<CR><Esc>my'xk$v'y!xclip -selection c<CR>u
Maybe there is still a way to configure vim in the right way? Are no vim specialists on this list?
Thanks
Alex
Ven Tadipatri
<Alexande...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> first of all thanks for a reply, although it does not answer all of my
> question.
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 18:05, Ven Tadipatri <vtadi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Well, this doesn't answer the question I asked earlier about using
>> visual mode to copy and paste.
>> But if you use xclip to copy,
>
> (what is xclip???)
xclip is a utility that allows you to use the clipboard on Linux
machines that use X11:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xclip/
Copy and paste is such a basic functionality, and I'm really surprised
that vim doesn't have a nice platform-independent way of handling
this. Actually even a platform-dependent way of copying and pasting
would work - it would just be nice if this were better documented
somewhere.
>>
>> If you can find a way to copy that's not as messy as putting this
>> in your .vimrc, please let me know:
>> vmap <C-c> :<Esc>`>a<CR><Esc>mx`<i<CR><Esc>my'xk$v'y!xclip -selection
>> c<CR>u
>>
That was something I figured out the painful way. What I basically do
is take the text to copy, put it on its own line, mark the beginning
of it, mark the end of it, and send it to xclip, which sends it to the
clipboard. But now, since the command executed, it wiped out the text
you wanted to copy, so I put a u at the end to undo it. If there's a
hall of fame for vim hacks, this should definitely go on it!
>
>
> with this unreadable mix of letters and characters, I am now able to use
> functionalities 1 and 2 of my have-to list (with having the shift key to
Wait, so then you must have xclip on your machine, if you got it to work, right?
> press in addition). I still cannot paste text, which I have marked with the
> mouse, to vim or a different editor.
>
> Maybe there is still a way to configure vim in the right way? Are no vim
> specialists on this list?
I'm working on the paste part myself, but I'm having difficulties getting my
ctrl+shift+v to work (it works on Linux, but not in Cygwin). I played
around a bit with the inputrc and now when I want to paste, it puts me
into visual mode - great.
Pardon my sarcasm, but yes, it bothers me a bit when we need to ask
a "vim specialist" on how to get copy and paste working. It should
definitely not be this complicated. I wonder, how do all the vim users
on this list use copy and paste?
Thanks,
Ven
>
>
> Thanks
> Alex
>
>
>> Thanks,
>> Ven
>>
Erik Falor
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 2:57 PM, Alexander Dietz
> <Alexande...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > first of all thanks for a reply, although it does not answer all of my
> > question.
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 18:05, Ven Tadipatri <vtadi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Well, this doesn't answer the question I asked earlier about using
> >> visual mode to copy and paste.
> >> But if you use xclip to copy,
> >
> > (what is xclip???)
>
> xclip is a utility that allows you to use the clipboard on Linux
> machines that use X11:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/xclip/
xclip lets you access the X11 clipboard on the command-line. In other
words, you can pipe text to and from the X11 selection buffer.
--
Erik Falor
Registered Linux User #445632 http://counter.li.org
sc
> definitely not be this complicated. I wonder, how do all the
> vim users on this list use copy and paste?
speaking for myself only, i got used to using ctrl-insert and
shift-insert way back in my windows days because they worked
in more places than ctrl-c and ctrl-v
i have several lines relating to them in my .vimrc:
nmap <S-Insert> "+gP
vmap <S-Insert> "-d"+P
imap <S-Insert> <C-O>:set paste<CR><C-R>+\|<C-O>:set nopaste<CR>
cmap <S-Insert> <C-R>+
imap <C-Insert> <C-O>"+y
vmap <C-Insert> "+y
vmap <S-Del> "+d
imap <C-Del> <C-O>daw
and lately, if i want to quit an app i am copying from before
i paste i make sure and start klipper beforehand
sc
Ven Tadipatri
> On Friday 01 October 2010 14:44:31 Ven Tadipatri wrote:
>
>
> i have several lines relating to them in my .vimrc:
>
> nmap <S-Insert> "+gP
> vmap <S-Insert> "-d"+P
> imap <S-Insert> <C-O>:set paste<CR><C-R>+\|<C-O>:set nopaste<CR>
> cmap <S-Insert> <C-R>+
> imap <C-Insert> <C-O>"+y
> vmap <C-Insert> "+y
> vmap <S-Del> "+d
> imap <C-Del> <C-O>daw
Unfortunately I haven't come across a system yet where the + buffers
were enabled. That's why I had to jump through all these hoops with
/dev/clipboard with Cygwin, and xclip on the Linux machines that used
X11.
So here's the latest attempt at pasting:
For Cygwin:
nmap <C-v> iz<Esc>mz:execute "normal a".system("cat /dev/clipboard")[:-2]<CR>`zx
For Linux:
nmap <C-v> iz<Esc>mz:execute "normal a".system("xclip -o")[:-2]<CR>`zx
or map it to the Middle Mouse:
map <MiddleMouse> iz<Esc>mz:execute "normal a".system("xclip -o")[:-2]<CR>`zx
Apparently when I execute a command, it puts it on the next line, but
this "normal a".system, passing it a system command pasted it right
where I want. Well, almost, because if I pasted it at the beginning
of the line, it pasted *after* the first character, which was
annoying. So I did another hack using marks to paste.
Ctrl+insert is a good idea if you don't want to overwrite the ctrl+v,
which is used to print out an escape character. That's why I was made
the key mappings for normal mode only, not visual or command mode.
Thanks,
Ven
Alexander Dietz
I am not sure if I correctly understood these tips. There were some ideas of using crtl+v and crtl+insert for copy/pasting text, but this is not what I want.
I want to copy a text to the clipboard by just marking the text in vim, and the using the middle-button of the mouse to paste it into my vim session (currently, I can paste text from the clipboard from somewhere else using shift-middle-button, which is just quite ok). I tried the tips given here (i.e. the long list of xmap instructions and the following:
map <MiddleMouse> iz<Esc>mz:execute "normal a".system("xclip -o")[:-2]<CR>`zx)
but still I cannot paste text in vim which I have selected before in vim. I have the following .vimrc:
:set number
:set paste
:set mouse=a
autocmd FileType * set tabstop=2|set shiftwidth=2|set noexpandtab
autocmd FileType python set tabstop=4|set shiftwidth=4|set expandtab
autocmd BufEnter * set ai sw=4 ts=4 sta et fo=croql
set softtabstop=4 " makes the spaces feel like real tabs
The following is a list of items that work, and which I want to work later as well:
1. I can use the mouse to left-click, to put the cursor to another place
2. I can paste text in (by using shift - middle-mouse-button) from some other application
But the following items do NOT work:
A. I cannot mark text in vim to copy it to the clipboard. I cannot paste text from vim to vim or some other application.
So my question: Is it possible to configure vim in that way so that marking as text will put it into the clipboard (so that a subsequent middle-click of the mouse will paste it to somewhere else) WITHOUT loosing the first two currently working abilities...? Is that possible at all without having to install something different (which I had to do on ~10 other computers as non-root...).
I hope it is clear this time. Sorry if I was not very clear before.
Thanks
Alex