Copy and Paste for tmux & vim on Linux

In this medium post from a while ago I talk about the flow I use for copying and pasting for tmux on macOS.

Now that I’m using a linux desktop, time for an update! As a sidebar, I’m using Ubuntu, so this might not work on other distros.

Tmux

The trick with copy/pasting is that you need way of communicating from Tmux to the X-window system, which manages your system clipboard on most Linux systems.

The solution to this is xclip . You can install it on Debian-based systems with aptitude:

$ sudo apt-get install xclip

After that, simply add this to your ~/.tmux.conf :

# For binding 'y' to copy and exiting selection mode bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel 'xclip -sel clip -i' # For binding 'Enter' to copy and not leave selection mode bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Enter send-keys -X copy-pipe 'xclip -sel clip -i' '\;' send -X clear-selection

Vim

Getting copy & paste from vim to work on Linux is also a little tricky, and doesn’t work out of the box. There are two main steps you need to take here:

Add clipboard support to vim.

You can check if your vim has clipboard support by typing the vim command:

:echo has("clipboard")

If it says “1” (like mine does), it means you have it, otherwise you need to install a vim package that has it, like vim-gnome , vim-athena , and vim-gtx .

set clipboard=unnamedplus

In macOS, adding clipboard=unnamed is enough to get copy/paste working. This command binds yanks in vim to the “*” register in vim, which in macOS corresponds to the system clipboard. In Linux, the “*” register is different it typically corresponds to the “mouse selection”, which is different to the normal system keyboard. The normal system clipboard in Linux corresponds to the “+” register in vim. In order to get vim to bind yanks to this register, use the command:

set clipboard=unnamedplus

For most setups, this should do the trick. If you are having trouble, the links below should be good starting points. Happy copypasta!

Reference (For older versions of tmux) http://www.rushiagr.com/blog/2016/06/16/everything-you-need-to-know-about-tmux-copy-pasting-ubuntu/ https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/276168/what-is-x11-exactly https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30691466/what-is-difference-between-vims-clipboard-unnamed-and-unnamedplus-settings http://vimcasts.org/blog/2013/11/getting-vim-with-clipboard-support http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Accessing_the_system_clipboard