For years, I’ve been copying text from console Vim running inside tmux running inside iTerm2 by doing this;
- Ctrl-a + Z – Zoom the current tmux pane to be full screen (if it wasn’t already)
- Hold down Alt and drag the mouse over the text I want to copy to the clipboard
- Ctrl-a + Z – Unzoom the current tmux pane
That’s not too awful, but it’s a lot more cumbersome than the process of copying text from one document to another within the same Vim session (or even within different Vim sessions, thanks to a short macro I wrote).
What makes it worse is when I’m editing a file in a git repository (which is about 95% of the time), I have Vim set up with the git gutterplugin. This shows a single character in column zero indicating whether the current line is an addition, deletion or change compared to the line in the git repo. That’s a nice feature, but those status characters are included whenever I use the mouse+Alt to select a chunk of text.
Today I learned from this Vimcast that I’ve been doing it all wrong.
Simply adding;
set clipboard=unnamed
to my .vimrc file makes Vim use the system clipboard as its default register. Anything I yank or delete gets added to the system clipboard, and I can paste anything from the clipboard with a single key.
So, the process of getting text from Vim to the system clipboard is now;
- Use Vim motion commands or visual mode to choose the text on which to operate
- Press y (or whatever other operation I want to use)
No messing about with zooming/unzooming panes, no need to switch from the keyboard to the mouse while almost dislocating my thumb trying to hold down the Alt key, and no git-gutter characters in the copied text.
Awesome! Thanks, Drew
Digital Ronin 