How to “copy to clipboard” in vim of Bash on Windows?

Question

I used to use \"+y to copy text to system\'s clipboard, but it doesn\'t work in vim of Bash on Windows.

Answer 1

If you don't want to set up an X server, this method will allow you to copy selected text to your clipboard using the clip.exe program which comes shipped with Windows.

The code snippets below can be placed in your .vimrc file.

First create a helper function which will return the currently selected text as a string. We can use this function to pipe highlighted text into clip.exe:

func! GetSelectedText()
    normal gv"xy
    let result = getreg("x")
    return result
endfunc

The system function will allow us to call native programs and pipe parameters into them. The snippet below sets up two key mappings; the first line will allow Ctrl+C to be used for copying text and the second will allow Ctrl+X for cutting text:

noremap  :call system('clip.exe', GetSelectedText())
noremap  :call system('clip.exe', GetSelectedText())gvx

After saving the changes to your .vimrc file you should be good to go.

If you are going to be using your .vimrc on multiple systems, I suggest wrapping these mappings in an if statement to check if clip.exe actually exists:

if !has("clipboard") && executable("clip.exe")
    noremap  :call system('clip.exe', GetSelectedText())
    noremap  :call system('clip.exe', GetSelectedText())gvx
endif

The above will also allow Vim to ignore those key bindings if it has direct access to the system clipboard.

You might also want to add keybindings for when vim does have access to the clipboard, like so:

if has("clipboard")
    vnoremap  "+x
    vnoremap  "+x

    vnoremap  "+y
    vnoremap  "+y

    map        "+gP
    map       "+gP

    cmap       +
    cmap      +
endif

Which will come in handy if you are using Vim natively on Windows or are using vim-gtk on a Linux system.