vim and system clipboard

Question

I can cat a file, copy and paste text with the middle button or shift-insert.

How can I copy text in vim and paste it from the system clipboard?

Answer 1

You need to have Vim with the clipboard and xtermclipboard features compiled in. In Ubuntu, these are only available with the vim GUI packages (vim-gnome, vim-gtk, vim-athena, etc.).

Once you install one of these, you can copy to (and paste from) the clipboard registers (* and +). From this very informative post on Vi and Vim:

For X11-based systems (ie. Linux and most other UNIX-like systems) there are 2 clipboards, which are independent of each other:

• PRIMARY - This is copy-on-select, and can be pasted with the middle mouse button.
• CLIPBOARD - This is copied with (usually) ^C, and pasted with ^V (It's like MS Windows).

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Vim has 2 special registers corresponding to these clipboards:

• * uses PRIMARY; mnemonic: star is select (for copy-on-select)
• + uses CLIPBOARD; mnemonic: CTRL + C (for the common keybind)

To copy to a register, you precede the copy command (y) with " and the name of the register (*, for example). "*y, then middle-click to paste, or "+y and ShiftInsert to paste.

Answer 2

I had issue because my vim was not supporting clipboard:

vim --version | grep clip
-clipboard       +insert_expand   +path_extra      +user_commands
+emacs_tags      -mouseshape      +startuptime     -xterm_clipboard

I installed vim-gnome (which support clipboard) and then checked again:

vim --version | grep clipboard
+clipboard       +insert_expand   +path_extra      +user_commands
+emacs_tags      +mouseshape      +startuptime     +xterm_clipboard

Now I am able to copy and paste using "+y and "+p respectively.

Answer 3

A quite interesting solution comes from this question. Install xclip, then pipe output of a command to xclip( cat file | xclip -selection clipboard for instance ), and then paste it anywhere, (if that's in terminal - use Ctrl ShiftV ). Now , turns out you can actually shorten that command to xclip -sel clip, which is not exactly apparent from reading man page or examples there.

Answer 4

Building up on Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy's answer, if you have compiled vim without xclip support, then do the following to copy content from vim to the system clipboard:

• Install xclip (sudo apt install xclip)
• Yank the required lines - this will be stored in the "0 register
• Then do :call system('xclip -sel clipboard', @0) to copy the contents to your clipboard.