Copying to the clipboard in Vim is easy: "*y.
What if you want to copy to your local keyboard from a vim session over ssh? "*y no longer works here.
Highlighting text in iTerm could theoretically work. I’m using tmux with Vim over ssh, and highlighting text really doesn’t work, for whatever reason. Until now, I was stuck retyping everything, or settling for a screenshot.
But I found a nice solution with the help of this stackoverflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1152362/how-to-send-data-to-local-clipboard-from-a-remote-ssh-session
There are two components:
- a vim mapping which yanks to a “personal vim clipboard” at ~/.vim/clip.txt
- a command run locally which ssh’s in and grabs the text from the vim clipboard,
The vim mapping:
noremap <LEADER>a :e ~/.vim/clip.txt<CR>:%d<CR>"0P:w<CR>:bd<CR>:echo "copied clipboard to ~/.vim/clip.txt"<CR>
This puts whatever you have currently yanked in the default register into the clipboard file. I imagine there is a way to configure yanking to “this clipboard” the way you would any other clipboard (doing "cy or something), but this works fine for me.
The ssh command is:
alias clip='ssh -Y salford@my_remote "cat ~/.vim/clip.txt" | pbcopy'
which I put in my bash/zsh environment so that I can get the clipboard text easily. I really only use one remote server often, so I’m content having an alias for that address specifically.
The vim mapping does the following in order:
:e ~/.vim/clip.txt<CR>(open the clipboard in a buffer):%d<CR>(delete the old clipboard text)"0P(paste the yanked text into the clipboard—we do “0 since the last command filled up the default register):w<CR>:bd<CR>(write and close the clipboard buffer):echo "copied clipboard to ~/.vim/clip.txt"<CR>(give some feedback that this happened)
The ssh command ssh’s into the remote server, cat’s the clipboard, and pipes the output into pbcopy, which copies the input into the system keyboard.
Maybe this will be helpful to someone. I was pleased with the vim mapping.
Simon's Tips 