Dude this helped SO much. I've been trying to find this stuff out and all I kept getting was "you never need to clipboard things in and out of vim". So many unhelpful posts read, UNTIL now. Not only that, but I also know more about registers and cool pluses of vim. Great video!
I read this solution, somewhere on stack overflow, of using '+' register to copy stuff out of vim, without any background on registers in vim, which left me confused. Thank you for making it clear! You're an awesome educator! 🙏
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I'm a new subscriber and I absolutely love your linux videos. You explain things in a way that makes understanding complex things easy, and your subjects are stuff I dont think I would have found on my own. Thank you
Dusta Rhymes I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Thanks Luke, for sharing the valuable information in a simple way, I was really confused, on how to do copy and paste through vim but after watching and implementing at the same time, I am amazed that it really works, my life is pretty simple now, I really appreciate your help.
It's also worth mentioning you can use the "* to access the register corresponding to the primary selection (i.e. the selection you can paste with middle mouse button and set by selecting text).
This is a good tip. I am using the terminal that I don’t like that much, but that has the shortcut shift control V, so when I need to copy and paste into vim I just press insert and the shortcut. Sometimes also as a workaround inside i3 I would have only one window with vim on split mode instead of having two windows neatly placed. Thanks, it’s much easier now.
You're a good man! I have been putting this off for a while but the frustration grew beyond my laziness. Luckily this was an easy solution without much effort.
the amount of problems this has solved for me is incredible. who knew that all I needed to do to be able to use windows shortcuts was to install gvim. thankyou kind sir you have earned my subscription
In GVIM, the contextual menus explains the VIM bindings for cut, copy and paste are shown ("+x for cut, "+y for copy, "+gP for paste) and works in the good ol' VIM.
This explanation was so helpful, I recently started using vim and loving it so far but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to make this work ^^"
thank you so much, its quite funny I just racked my brain for a good hour trying to figure out how to copy and paste in and out of vim, your tutorial was great but from what I understand Im not the only person struggling with gnome desktop, I think Ill have to use gvim, thanks
I used ctrl alt c/ctrl alt v or shift insert to copy/paste, its the terminal clipboard, but it always cut the first letters, finally someone explained how to properly use the registers
I have a number of things for a number of use cases. For clipboard access, I have two scripts, pc and pp (for pasteboard copy and pasteboard paste, inspired by the macos commands), which call the relevant clipboard access whether X, Wayland, Macos, Cygwin, or WSL. Then I have a python clipboard server running on my pi3 which has named clipboards I can put to/get from (so e.g. echo hello | aput boing, and then aget boing will recall). This gives me LAN-wide named clipboards. Then another one is similar, cput, (again in Python) which uses a mysql server as its backend, and maintains a history of previously copied text. Another one, dput, uses a PHP backend and has a web interface. In vim, I use pp pc to copy lines to/from the clipboard; and have similar mappings for aget, cget, and dget.
I'm too lazy to even rebind "+p/y in my vimrc, so I just enter insert mode and use st's built in ctrl+shift+c/v. I also have tmux to select text from my terminal buffer with the keyboard so I don't have to use the mouse.
note a caveat to this is that when using vim over ssh, which many of us usually do, the system clipboard may not work. It also may not work if vim isnt compiled with system clipboard support. To get around this you can make use of the OSC52 escape sequence when send the data encoded to your terminal emulator which saves it to your clipboard.
Could you explain more about this? I know terminal emulators have big long lists of escape sequences buried in their settings but not much more. How does this work?
Just out of instinct I tried issuing "gvim" and when apt said to me that I could install it by installing vim, vim-gtk and other, I was like "Where's gvim?"... Anyway, I installed vim-gtk3 and it includes gvim, now I have acces to the + register. Excelent video
Great Video !! I actually didn't learn anything but i sure would have loved learning that in this video with you cause you always make it easy and simple. So cool !
There is another very simple way to copy/paste text to and from a terminal instance or a browser, for example, using your mouse. Just select what you need to copy using your mouse press 'ctrl+shift+c' to copy from a terminal and ctrl+shift+v to paste to a terminal. However, if you copy something from a terminal, you will have to do the usual ctrl + v on the browser to paste and vice versa. I had this behaviour by default on my Artix Linux install on all terminal emulators, of course barring tty. I am not sure whether it has to be added in other scenarios.
If you're on X11, one choice is xsel. For Wayland, wl-paste. For cygwin you write to or read from /dev/clipboard. For macos there is pbcopy and pbpaste. (So I have as I mentioned earlier, two scripts pp and pc which choose the appropriate way to deal with the clipboard.)
The root of a general solution is :w and :r. You can select some lies, then :w !myprog, and this will pipe the selected lines to the stdin of myproc. Note the space comes after the :w but before the !. Then :r! myprog will run myprog and paste the stdout into your vim buffer below the current line. Note this time that the space comes after the !. What wonderful consistency. Also when you have some lines selected via visual, :!myprog will pipe those lies into myprog's stdin, and then replace the selection with myprog's stdout.
I’m sure that you already know, but you can set the option like “:set clipboard=unnamed” or in some cases set it to “unnamedplus”. Once this is done, anything you yank or paste will go to/from your system clipboard without you having to do “* every time or even creating a mapping that does that.
I have tried many variations of this on my system and it doesn't seem to work, I don't know if it is distro dependent or requires some random software I don't have. (using debian 11) edit: lol unnamedplus does the trick, thank you stranger!
I was just this morning wanting to copy more than would fit on my terminal from vim this morning into something. Obviously if it's just something that fits on a screen I can use the mouse to copy but when it's more than a screenful I can't. Thanks. Had to install gvim (which actually requires installing vim-gnome, there is no gvim in the repo)
Great Video! I have a question tho: I am currently working on a HPC running CentOS 7.3 . A takst i have to do quite often is to copy something from the terminal and paste it in Vim. For example the output of the "pwd" command. At the moment i highlight the text with the mouse, which paste it to the clipboard i guess, and than i paste it in vim by right clicking the mouse in insert mode. IF i highlight text in the terminal ( wich copys it to clip) and type "+p in Vim i get nothing. If i tyoe :reg i dont see the copied text in any register... but i can paste it by right clicking the mouse. Any help would be appreciated!
Yeah, and after some googling I found the command: vim --version | grep clipboard which after you run you need to search for "+clipboard" or "+xterm_clipboard", if you have those you can copy and paste to and from the clipboard. vim.wikia.com/wiki/Accessing_the_system_clipboard is what I found after half a minute of searching.
gVim has full X11 working, change fonts on the fly, gtk/gtk3/motif/athena, full mouse x11, more colors, more keys supports that does not depend from terminals like alt/meta, some extra things and of course clipboard too.
Is there any clipboard manager type app for Vim? When copying multiple text fragments, is there any way to check which register (a, b, c, d etc) should be pasted?
Hey Luke, love the videos. Why do you have your line numbers set up this way? I don't understand why you might want to know what's 2 lines above or below rather than just viewing line numbers normally. Thanks for the content.
Hi Luke. Thanks for another great video. I am having issues with the + register being wiped as I exit Vim. I tried "autocmd VimLeave * call system("xsel -ib", getreg('+'))", which should pass the buffer as vim quits, but it doesn't seem to work. Any thoughts on what's going on? I should mention that I am running Ubuntu with X11 I3
NeoVim now allows you to do things the best possible way: Using the system clipboard as the unnamed register: set clipboard+=unnamedplus This behaviour seems quite invasive, but I'll use it for a while and see if I like it.
@@markcuello5 It's a fork of Vim that mainly served to make Vim development more active through artificial market competition. The two are mostly the same, but NeoVim is slightly better.
When running vim on an external server, will the "+y command copy to the local or the server clipboard? I haven't tried it yet, but my intuition yes me it will use the server clipboard, so it still couldn't be used to paste into my local Firefox. To get around this, I have simply enabled ctl-c and ctl-v in my Terminator preferences. It isn't minimal but I haven't had any issues. I can simply highlight anything on the terminal with the mouse and copy and paste like normal.
Hahahaha can't believe this video popped up right now, I needed to send a mate some text yesterday out of a file and I didn't know how so I uploaded the entire file to some sketchy website so he could download it.
When I use 'vim' straight from terminal. I have almost all the features including copy and pasting to and fro vim and other programs. But it doesn't work when I get into vim from 'ranger'. Can someone help?
Dude this helped SO much. I've been trying to find this stuff out and all I kept getting was "you never need to clipboard things in and out of vim". So many unhelpful posts read, UNTIL now.
Not only that, but I also know more about registers and cool pluses of vim. Great video!
I read this solution, somewhere on stack overflow, of using '+' register to copy stuff out of vim, without any background on registers in vim, which left me confused.
Thank you for making it clear! You're an awesome educator! 🙏
Where have you been my entire life?
This channel man. This channel right here.
Damn, it's so good.
Wow, You not only answered what I searched, but also taught me a lot about copying and pasting inside vim. Thanks.
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I'm a new subscriber and I absolutely love your linux videos. You explain things in a way that makes understanding complex things easy, and your subjects are stuff I dont think I would have found on my own. Thank you
You're a great teacher.
yeah, agree.
he explain things easly
me too
@@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx lol
Very well made. I'll rewatch this one later and play around with it. Thank you Luke!
Luke, you're the gift that keeps on giving. freakin love your vids, wouldn't be able to Linux without them
do not stop or i will find you
Dusta Rhymes I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
@@finnianquail8881 WHO THE F CARES I CALL IT LINUX STOP ME
@@finnianquail8881 here comes RMS agent :3
Obey koomer
@@finnianquail8881 I hear ya but could it not be Linux+GNU as the kernel is loaded first right? 😬
Sabaton ... a man of culture!
Thanks Luke, for sharing the valuable information in a simple way, I was really confused, on how to do copy and paste through vim but after watching and implementing at the same time, I am amazed that it really works, my life is pretty simple now, I really appreciate your help.
It's also worth mentioning you can use the "* to access the register corresponding to the primary selection (i.e. the selection you can paste with middle mouse button and set by selecting text).
This is a good tip. I am using the terminal that I don’t like that much, but that has the shortcut shift control V, so when I need to copy and paste into vim I just press insert and the shortcut. Sometimes also as a workaround inside i3 I would have only one window with vim on split mode instead of having two windows neatly placed. Thanks, it’s much easier now.
After so many tutorials on internet I found this solution on your channel. Thank you soo much man.
me too
You're a good man! I have been putting this off for a while but the frustration grew beyond my laziness. Luckily this was an easy solution without much effort.
neovim comes with sys clipboard access as well
Novim comes with bloat as well.
@@xerneastrainer8111 I like neovim
The bloat police are on the case!
This is what I was looking for by years. Thanks.
the amount of problems this has solved for me is incredible. who knew that all I needed to do to be able to use windows shortcuts was to install gvim. thankyou kind sir you have earned my subscription
ah the era of me closing vim, opening notepad to copy something over, and then reopening vim is finally over. Thank you sir
In GVIM, the contextual menus explains the VIM bindings for cut, copy and paste are shown ("+x for cut, "+y for copy, "+gP for paste) and works in the good ol' VIM.
I like your music, sabaton forever! 🤘
5:23 C-v is normally block visual select, which i use a ton xD
holy shit. cristal clear like water, thank you dude. FUCK YEAH now I can copy paste from my browser love you dawg
amazing. I m trying this since 2 years :)
Thank you! Everything I needed I learned in this video.
Luke I enjoy your videos and watch every one of. Thank You.
Thanks for letting me learn something new today
is used for block visual by default.
This explanation was so helpful, I recently started using vim and loving it so far but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to make this work ^^"
read a website that teaches me the same syntax but the lack of context is confusing and this video helps me. TY!
thank you so much, its quite funny I just racked my brain for a good hour trying to figure out how to copy and paste in and out of vim, your tutorial was great but from what I understand Im not the only person struggling with gnome desktop, I think Ill have to use gvim, thanks
Thank you for this. Helped a lot.
I used ctrl alt c/ctrl alt v or shift insert to copy/paste, its the terminal clipboard, but it always cut the first letters, finally someone explained how to properly use the registers
I have a number of things for a number of use cases. For clipboard access, I have two scripts, pc and pp (for pasteboard copy and pasteboard paste, inspired by the macos commands), which call the relevant clipboard access whether X, Wayland, Macos, Cygwin, or WSL. Then I have a python clipboard server running on my pi3 which has named clipboards I can put to/get from (so e.g. echo hello | aput boing, and then aget boing will recall). This gives me LAN-wide named clipboards. Then another one is similar, cput, (again in Python) which uses a mysql server as its backend, and maintains a history of previously copied text. Another one, dput, uses a PHP backend and has a web interface.
In vim, I use pp pc to copy lines to/from the clipboard; and have similar mappings for aget, cget, and dget.
The editor I use has these keyboard bindings, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, I use them a lot.
lol
what is you editor are you using: sublime or vscode?
@@tuananhdo1870 Provably ED. :D
@@tuananhdo1870 Notepad, of course:)))
I'm too lazy to even rebind "+p/y in my vimrc, so I just enter insert mode and use st's built in ctrl+shift+c/v. I also have tmux to select text from my terminal buffer with the keyboard so I don't have to use the mouse.
muchas gracias por el video, soy nuevo con Vim y me ha ayudado mucho
Thanks for making this video.
Very helpful.
Straight to the point. Useful. Liked and subscribed
Thank you very much. It got so easier now.
Nicely done!
Good explanation, thank you!
So simple and you save a lot of trouble! thanks
note a caveat to this is that when using vim over ssh, which many of us usually do, the system clipboard may not work. It also may not work if vim isnt compiled with system clipboard support. To get around this you can make use of the OSC52 escape sequence when send the data encoded to your terminal emulator which saves it to your clipboard.
Could you explain more about this? I know terminal emulators have big long lists of escape sequences buried in their settings but not much more. How does this work?
Just out of instinct I tried issuing "gvim" and when apt said to me that I could install it by installing vim, vim-gtk and other, I was like "Where's gvim?"... Anyway, I installed vim-gtk3 and it includes gvim, now I have acces to the + register. Excelent video
Great Video !! I actually didn't learn anything but i sure would have loved learning that in this video with you cause you always make it easy and simple. So cool !
There is another very simple way to copy/paste text to and from a terminal instance or a browser, for example, using your mouse. Just select what you need to copy using your mouse press 'ctrl+shift+c' to copy from a terminal and ctrl+shift+v to paste to a terminal. However, if you copy something from a terminal, you will have to do the usual ctrl + v on the browser to paste and vice versa. I had this behaviour by default on my Artix Linux install on all terminal emulators, of course barring tty. I am not sure whether it has to be added in other scenarios.
Thx, simple and useful tip.
Damn, it's so good.
thank you so much, this was super helpful.
Thanks! You saved my day.
God bless you!
Hell yeah. Thanks for the help.
One of the many heros of the internet
thanks luke, great help!
Thank you for helping me out
Saved my life. Thanks
u re a king man
If you're on X11, one choice is xsel. For Wayland, wl-paste. For cygwin you write to or read from /dev/clipboard. For macos there is pbcopy and pbpaste. (So I have as I mentioned earlier, two scripts pp and pc which choose the appropriate way to deal with the clipboard.)
Very informative, thanks
Great tutorial
Thank you! I love vim, but missing that copy paste thing drove me crazy. :D
Thx! Great Explanation!
3:15 "So I'm gonna close out of this and then I'll be right back"
"Okay so I've showered and I still feel dirty so I'll just end this video now."
The root of a general solution is :w and :r. You can select some lies, then :w !myprog, and this will pipe the selected lines to the stdin of myproc. Note the space comes after the :w but before the !. Then :r! myprog will run myprog and paste the stdout into your vim buffer below the current line. Note this time that the space comes after the !. What wonderful consistency. Also when you have some lines selected via visual, :!myprog will pipe those lies into myprog's stdin, and then replace the selection with myprog's stdout.
What does
this was great
I’m sure that you already know, but you can set the option like “:set clipboard=unnamed” or in some cases set it to “unnamedplus”. Once this is done, anything you yank or paste will go to/from your system clipboard without you having to do “* every time or even creating a mapping that does that.
I have tried many variations of this on my system and it doesn't seem to work, I don't know if it is distro dependent or requires some random software I don't have. (using debian 11)
edit: lol unnamedplus does the trick, thank you stranger!
But then you lose the utility of having different clipboard registers.
@@kamehameha38 It's no utility, to me it's complete stupidity and making life difficult for people.
I was just this morning wanting to copy more than would fit on my terminal from vim this morning into something. Obviously if it's just something that fits on a screen I can use the mouse to copy but when it's more than a screenful I can't. Thanks. Had to install gvim (which actually requires installing vim-gnome, there is no gvim in the repo)
Many tanks :>
Great explanation! Unfortunately it is a nightmare to get working on WSL :(
Great Video! I have a question tho: I am currently working on a HPC running CentOS 7.3 . A takst i have to do quite often is to copy something from the terminal and paste it in Vim. For example the output of the "pwd" command. At the moment i highlight the text with the mouse, which paste it to the clipboard i guess, and than i paste it in vim by right clicking the mouse in insert mode. IF i highlight text in the terminal ( wich copys it to clip) and type "+p in Vim i get nothing. If i tyoe :reg i dont see the copied text in any register... but i can paste it by right clicking the mouse. Any help would be appreciated!
awesome video.💪💪💪💪
Thanks a ton
it seems that on gentoo vim has the ability by default, if you build it with USE="X", which is likely what 90% of people do.
Yeah, and after some googling I found the command:
vim --version | grep clipboard
which after you run you need to search for "+clipboard" or "+xterm_clipboard", if you have those you can copy and paste to and from the clipboard.
vim.wikia.com/wiki/Accessing_the_system_clipboard
is what I found after half a minute of searching.
You are the best
pretty useful
unexpected Sabaton :)
Thank you Luke, ngl tho you scared me when you opened gvim
god Bless you
Thanks!
thank you
I just got an X220 with Arch, I'm getting closer. My desktop has Gentoo :3
I didn't know gvim has the clipboard build in. I remember compiling vim from scratch to get clipboard working.
gVim has full X11 working, change fonts on the fly, gtk/gtk3/motif/athena, full mouse x11, more colors, more keys supports that does not depend from terminals like alt/meta, some extra things and of course clipboard too.
@@ThreelionsSFIV I know that now, I use gvim for pretty much everything, it's much better than TUI vim.
You can also use neovim, which is always compiled with the huge option, giving you all the features of vim, and also has saner defaults.
Hahahaha "it's as simple as that"
Is there any clipboard manager type app for Vim? When copying multiple text fragments, is there any way to check which register (a, b, c, d etc) should be pasted?
Hey Luke, love the videos. Why do you have your line numbers set up this way? I don't understand why you might want to know what's 2 lines above or below rather than just viewing line numbers normally. Thanks for the content.
Why not just g? If you know the line number say 100, you can easily go to it by typing "100g"
Thanks dude save d alot of time
To move the cursor after the paste, I would suggest gp rather than capital p.
Thanks
Hi Luke. Thanks for another great video.
I am having issues with the + register being wiped as I exit Vim.
I tried "autocmd VimLeave * call system("xsel -ib", getreg('+'))", which should pass the buffer as vim quits, but it doesn't seem to work. Any thoughts on what's going on? I should mention that I am running Ubuntu with X11 I3
NeoVim now allows you to do things the best possible way: Using the system clipboard as the unnamed register:
set clipboard+=unnamedplus
This behaviour seems quite invasive, but I'll use it for a while and see if I like it.
Wow; `NeoVim`. Never heard of it. Is it a `Wiki`?
@@markcuello5 It's a fork of Vim that mainly served to make Vim development more active through artificial market competition.
The two are mostly the same, but NeoVim is slightly better.
When running vim on an external server, will the "+y command copy to the local or the server clipboard? I haven't tried it yet, but my intuition yes me it will use the server clipboard, so it still couldn't be used to paste into my local Firefox. To get around this, I have simply enabled ctl-c and ctl-v in my Terminator preferences. It isn't minimal but I haven't had any issues. I can simply highlight anything on the terminal with the mouse and copy and paste like normal.
Would you consider a video on regular expressions and implementing them in bash scripts? Whenever I'm actually scripting I seem to go brain dead
That's what happens when you Bash your Head with a |, Fsck 😀
watch data wrangling missing semesters
Hahahaha can't believe this video popped up right now, I needed to send a mate some text yesterday out of a file and I didn't know how so I uploaded the entire file to some sketchy website so he could download it.
i'm pretty sure if you map control+v to 'paste' you will lose the ability to use "---visual block----" mode not sure tho maybe im just a noob
thanks
i CTRL ^ V
or "+vimcomand
Also i use neovim
which have it by default ^
Hello Luke. Thanks for this video but the trick does not seem to work on my machine (Fedora 30 + vim 8.1.1359)...
When I use 'vim' straight from terminal. I have almost all the features including copy and pasting to and fro vim and other programs.
But it doesn't work when I get into vim from 'ranger'. Can someone help?