A Vim / Neovim plugin to copy text to the system clipboard from anywhere using the ANSI OSC52 sequence.
When this sequence is emitted by Vim, the terminal will copy the given text into the system clipboard. This is totally location independent, users can copy from anywhere including from remote SSH sessions.
The only requirement is that the terminal must support the sequence. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the status of popular terminal emulators regarding OSC52 (as of June 2022):
Terminal | OSC52 support |
---|---|
Alacritty | yes |
foot | yes |
GNOME Terminal (and other VTE-based terminals) | not yet |
hterm (Chromebook) | yes |
iTerm2 | yes |
kitty | yes |
Konsole | not yet |
QTerminal | not yet |
screen | yes |
st | yes (but needs to be enabled, see here) |
Terminal.app | no, but see workaround |
tmux | yes |
Windows Terminal | yes |
rxvt | yes (to be confirmed) |
urxvt | yes (with a script, see here) |
xterm.js (Hyper terminal) | not yet |
wezterm | yes |
far2l | yes |
Feel free to add terminals to this list by submitting a pull request.
With vim-plug:
Plug 'ojroques/vim-oscyank', {'branch': 'main'}
Enter Visual mode, select your text and run :OSCYank
.
You may want to map the command:
vnoremap <leader>c :OSCYank<CR>
You can also use the OSCYank operator:
nmap <leader>o <Plug>OSCYank
like so for instance:
<leader>o_ " copy the current line
<leader>oip " copy the inner paragraph
If you prefer to copy text from a particular register, use:
:OSCYankReg + " this will copy to clipboard the text in register '+'
To copy after any yank operation:
autocmd TextYankPost * if v:event.operator is 'y' && v:event.regname is '' | execute 'OSCYankReg "' | endif
Or to copy only the +
register (vim's system clipboard register):
autocmd TextYankPost * if v:event.operator is 'y' && v:event.regname is '+' | execute 'OSCYankReg +' | endif
By default you can copy up to 100000 characters at once. If your terminal supports it, you can raise that limit with:
let g:oscyank_max_length = 1000000
The plugin treats tmux, screen and kitty differently than other terminal emulators. The plugin should automatically detects the terminal used but you can bypass detection with:
let g:oscyank_term = 'tmux' " or 'screen', 'kitty', 'default'
By default a confirmation message is echoed after text is copied. This can be disabled with:
let g:oscyank_silent = v:true " or 1 for older versions of Vim
First follow this guide from
tmux. If it still doesn't work,
try setting set -s set-clipboard on
in your tmux config and put let g:oscyank_term = 'default'
in your Vim config (see issue #26).
There are already Vim plugins implementing OSC52. However this plugin fixes several issues I've had with them:
- It supports Neovim.
- It supports Windows.
- It does not mandate users to overwrite their unnamed register (
"
). - It makes the maximum length of strings configurable.
- It supports kitty versions
below
0.22.0
which implement a slightly modified OSC52 protocol.
The code is derived from hterm's script.