If you are using GVim, you can also set guioptions+=a
. This will trigger automatic copy to clipboard of text that you highlight in visual mode.
Drawback: Note that advanced clipboard managers (with history) will in this case get all your selection history…
For some international keyboards, you may need to press "+Space to get a "
.
So in those case you would have to press "Space+y or "Space*y
I wasn't able to copy to my clipboard's system because I had this in my ~/.vimrc file:
if has('mouse')
set mouse=a
endif
But if you add this line next, it will allow you to simply Ctrl+c to get whatever you have selected into your clipboard.
vmap <C-c> "+y
Original discussion and more details: Copy text out of vim with set mouse=a enabled
For Ubuntu - July 2018
Use the register "+ to copy to the system clipboard (i.e. "+y instead of y).
Likewise you can paste from "+ to get text from the system clipboard (i.e. "+p instead of p).
You have to also make sure that vim is compiled with support for the clipboard. Try:
vim --version | grep .xterm_clipboard -o
and if it's -xterm_clipboard (a minus prefix) then you do not have support.
Here are some instructions for swapping out with a working version of vim that has clipboard support.
sudo apt-get install vim-gtk3
for newer Ubuntu versions)Check again with vim --version | grep .xterm_clipboard -o
and you can confirm the clipboard is now available (ie. +xterm_clipboard)
Good luck.
for OSX, like the 10342 answers above made clear, you need to make sure that vim supports the clipboard feature, said the the one that comes pre-shipped with OSX does NOT support clipboard, and that if you run
brew install vim
it would work.
Except that running vi will still make you run the preshipped OSX version, not the one you installed from brew.
to get over this, I simply aliased my vim command to the brew version, not the OSX default one:
alias vim="/usr/local/Cellar/vim/8.0.1100_1/bin/vim"
and now i'm golden
You can find the answers here Arch Wiki
For Linux:
First of all you have to enable Clipboard in your vim version by installing
gvim
.
Next you have to put this line on your .vimrc
file.
set clipboard=unnamedplus
I'm on mac osx (10.15.3) and new to vim. I found this so frustrating and all the answers on here too complicated and/or didn't apply to my situation. I ended up getting this working in 2 ways:
key mapping that uses pbcopy: works on the old version of vim that ships with mac.
Add
vmap '' :w !pbcopy<CR><CR>
to your ~/.vimrc
Now you can visually select and hit''
(two apostrophes) to copy to clipboard
Install newer version of vim so I can access the solution most recommended in other answers:
brew install vim
alias vim=/usr/local/bin/vim
(should add this to your ~/.bashrc or equivalent)
Now you can visually select and hit"+yy
to copy to clipboard
if you connect to the unix system thru putty then follow the steps below to copy content of a file
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.
vnoremap :w !cp /dev/null ~/temp.txt && cat > ~/temp.txt
noremap :r !cat ~/temp.txt
I saw many answers on this question and the way to make this work was a combination of many.
The steps I followed to make vim copy to system clipboard are
sudo apt remove vim
. (I was too lazy to find how to re-compile it with the +clipboard support.sudo apt install vim-athena
that ships with +clipboard.~/.vimrc
the following line: set clipboard=unnamedplus
.source %
.Note: I am using Ubuntu 20.04.
If you are using vim in MAC OSX, unfortunately it comes with older verion, and not complied with clipboard options. Luckily, homebrew can easily solve this problem.
install vim:
brew install vim
install gui verion of vim:
brew install macvim
restart the terminal to take effect.
append the following line to ~/.vimrc
set clipboard=unnamed
now you can copy the line in vim with yy
and paste it system-wide.
Updated Method:
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.
Copy the text [range] of vim into the system clipboard. (Hint: use v
or V
to select the range first, and then type the colon :
to activate the Ex command):
:[line-range]yank +
e.g.,
:5,10y *
(copy/yank lines 5-10 to the system clipboard *
register)
Paste the content from the system clipboard into vim on a new line:
:put +
Note:
brew info vim
will be able to see other options for installing vim. Currrently it does not have any other options.set clipboard=unnamed
in your vimrc
.Visual
mode (Press v to enter).Normal
mode (Press escape[esc]), press y to copy.Normal
mode. If you have xclip an easy way of copying text to the clipboard is as follows:
y
command in vanilla vim):call system("xclip -selection clipboard", @")
: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.
xclip -selection clipboard
just copies text into the system clipboard as opposed to the default X clipboard, (Accessed by the middle moue button).
@"
returns the last yanked text. " is the default register, but you could use any register. To see the contents of all registers, type :registers
.
This question already has a lot of answers. I am adding my way which I think is quick.
Quickly, you can press V
(Shift + v) to active visual mode. In visible mode, you can use j
and k
to select the text you want to copy. After selection, use
"*y
Now, selected text is copied to clipboard.
My solution was putting the following line to .vimrc:
map <C-y> :w !xclip -sel c <CR><CR>
The script copies the selected line (trough visual mode) or the file content (if none is selected) to the clipboard using Ctrl + y. I'm using Manjaro Linux if that matters.
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
Summing up and make it easier for newbies,
To copy the current line, in command mode type:
"*yy
To copy the whole file/buffer, in command mode, first go to the beginning via gg
, then type
"*yG
As noted, this requires +clipboard
out of vim --version
, which indicate the availability of clipboard support, -clipboard
means no.
In vim under ubuntu terminal only,
press shift + drag mouse
to select a text in vim then ctrl + shift + c
on the terminal
then ctrl + v
on other editor
In my instance selecting text by highlighting (clicking and dragging) with my mouse was causing vim to enter into visual mode.
On a mac anyway, the easiest solution is to use fn + mouse click and drag
to avoid entering into visual mode.
If you wish to avoid this behavior by default you can edit your vimrc
the solution for me was to install additional vim that has the clipboard option included:
sudo apt-get install vim-gnome
selecting
with the the help of the mouse
and right-click copy
worked in my case.
I didn't want the line numbers included so I :set nonumber
before copying
.
Nothing above worked for me on my windows laptop.
Ctrl+C was fine for copying.. but I needed Shift+Insert to Paste !
(A good reason to always get a laptop where Insert can always be accessed without pressing a secondary key)
In your vimrc file you can specify to automatically use the system clipboard for copy and paste.
On Windows set:
set clipboard=unnamed
On Linux set (vim 7.3.74+):
set clipboard=unnamedplus
NOTE: You may need to use an up to date version of Vim for these to work.
I'm a Vim newby but, to copy all the text to system clipboard (e.g if you want to paste it to a word processor or another text editor like gedit, mousepad etc...), in normal mode:
ggVGy
or, more simply:
:%y
As suggested, I also installed vim-gtk and put
set clipboard=unnamedplus
in my .vimrc
and everything works fine
If you want to copy only a portion of text, use visual mode (v), select the text you want to copy and press y.
Finally, I suggest a clipboard program like Clipman (my favorite), Clipit, Parcellite or similar.
(I'm using vim 8.0 in Debian Stretch Xfce)
FORGIVE ME FOR MY ENGLISH! :-)
I've been struggling with this for months till now on MacOsX using keyboard shortcuts. I know question isn't about using keyboard shorts. But this might help someone with the same concern.
I found that if you uncheck:
View -> Allow Mouse Reporting
from Terminal menu, you'll be able to copy to clipboard using
command + c
again.
@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 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:
map <C-c> y:e ~/clipsongzboard<CR>P:w !pbcopy<CR><CR>:bdelete!<CR>
If you'd like to read details about what this does, you can read about this on my blog
On Mac OSX
copy selected part: visually select text(type v
or V
in normal
mode) and type :w !pbcopy
copy the whole file :%w !pbcopy
paste from the clipboard :r !pbpaste
On most Linux Distros, you can substitute:
pbcopy
above with xclip -i -sel c
or xsel -i -b
pbpaste
using xclip -o -sel -c
or xsel -o -b
xsel
and xclip
) are preinstalled on your distro, you can probably find them in the reposI have struggled a lot in copying to clipboard. Inside Vim it is quite simple using visual mode but if you want to copy to the clipboard things are quite messsed. I have simple method of copying using xclip utility. For this you must have to install xclip first.
for the whole file it is very simple
xclip -sel clip filename
but if you want to copy only a particular range of line numbers
tail -n +[n1] filename | head -n [n2] | xclip -sel clip
you can make use of ~/.bashrc to simplify this
#rangecp copy lines from n1 to n2 from a given file to clipboard
function rangecp()
{
if [ -f $1 ]
then
if [ ! -z $3 ]
then
diff=$(($3 - $2 + 1))
#diff=`expr $3 - $2 + 1`
tail -n +$2 $1 | head -n $diff | xclip -sel clip
elif [ ! -z $2 ]
then
tail -n +$2 $1 | xclip -sel clip
else
echo "Provide a range from [n1] lines to [n2] lines"
fi
else
echo "[ $1 ] file doesn't exist"
fi
}
then
source ~/.bashrc
How to use
rangecp filename.txt 50 89
rangecp filename.txt 50
I want to supplement a way to copy the line to the clipboard and use it on the function.
here is an example that you open the URL in the browser
let g:chrome_exe = 'C:/.../Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe'
function OpenURL()
" copy the line and put it in the register *
normal "*yy
:execute "silent !start ".g:chrome_exe." ".getreg("*")
endfunction
map ,url :call OpenURL()<CR>
Use the register "+
to copy to the system clipboard (i.e. "+y
instead of y
).
Likewise you can paste from "+
to get text from the system clipboard (i.e. "+p
instead of p
).
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 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.
This answer is specific to MAC users.
The default VIM available with MAC does not come with clipboard option enabled. You need that option to access the system clipboard.
To check if your vim has that option enabled use the below command
vim --version
In the result, you should have +clipboard
. If it is -clipboard
, then your VIM does NOT have the option to access the system clipboard.
You need to MAKE and install your VIM with the option you need. Following are the commands.
# Create the directories you need
$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/bin
# Download, compile, and install the latest Vim
$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
$ cd vim
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/local
$ make
$ sudo make install
# Add the binary to your path, ahead of /usr/bin
$ echo 'PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
# Reload bash_profile so the changes take effect in this window
$ source ~/.bash_profile"
The above will install the latest VIM with the option +clipboard
enabled.
Now you need to set the system clipboard. Append the following line to ~/.vimrc
set clipboard=unnamed
Now you can yank text to system clipboard. Below steps explains how to yank.
press v
, this will switch you to VISUAL mode.Press y
, this will copy the selected text to clipboard.CMD + v
to paste.I use MACBook Pro with macOS Mojave and the above works in it.
Source: Stackoverflow.com