How to copy a selection to the OS X clipboard

Question

I have an area selected in Vim. How can I copy it into the OS X clipboard?

(The OS X clipboard can be written to via a pipe to /usr/bin/pbcopy)

Answer 1

Copying to clipboard using register '+' or '*' is not working?

Reason: Your particular version of vim was compiled without clipboard support.Type vim --verion on console and you will see -xterm_clipboard. Installing vim with gui packages solves this issue. On ubuntu you can do this by typing on shell:

sudo apt-get install vim-gui-common

Now again do vim --version on console. Most probably, you would be seeing +xterm_clipboard now!!

So, now you can copy anything to clipboard using register + (like "+yy to copy current line to clipboard)

Answer 2

For MacVim and Windows Gvim, simply add the following to your ~/.vimrc:

set clipboard=unnamed

Now all operations such as yy, D, and P work with the clipboard. No need to prefix them with "* or "+.

Answer 3

Fakeclip implements the + and * buffers if they aren't natively supported.

Answer 4

My main problem was the default OSX version of Vim. Installing it via homebrew added +clipboard to the build.

You can check with:

vim --version

to see if it says -clipboard or +clipboard.

Answer 5

if you have the +clipboard option on your Vim installation (you can check with :version) and you are in visual mode you can do "+y This will yank the selection to the buffer + that is the clipboard.

I have added the following maps to my vimrc and it works fine.

vmap <leader>y "+y : With this I can do leader key follow by y to copy to the clipboard in visual mode.

nmap <leader>p "+p : With this I can do leader key follow by p to paste from the clipboard on normal mode.

PD : On Ubuntu I had to install vim-gtk to get the +clipboard option.

Answer 6

For Ubuntu users, the package you want to retrieve for using the clipboard is vim-full. The other packages (vim-tiny, vim) do not include the clipboard feature.