vim + COPY + mac over SSH

Question

I access a sever over ssh on which I run vim for editing files. When I try to yank text from vim into an editor locally on my mac (lion) either with y OR \"+y it does not work.

Answer 1

My first answer on stackoverflow, but I feel it's a cool (albeit tiny) trick and it's worth posting. So here's what I do :

cat 

When the text is printed onto the terminal, I select all the text with my mouse (the mouse scroll works since we're on the terminal window). Then copy that text with Cmd+C and paste into my local text editor.

The only flaw with this trick is that it's impractical to use if your files are tens of thousands of lines long since selecting all the lines with your mouse would be a task in itself. But for a file of ~2k lines it works well.