Copy to system clipboard instead of vim buffer

Question

I would like to set Y and P to copy and paste directly to the system clipboard instead of vim buffer.

I don't want any additional commands. Just the normal ones, but they should copy to and paste from the system clipboard and bypass the vim buffer.

How can I achieve this?

I'm running vim on Ubuntu 10.10.

Answer 1

You can have Vim use the clipboard instead of the default register for yanking, putting, etc., by adding this command to your ~/.vimrc:

set clipboard+=unnamed

See

:help clipboard
:help 'clipboard'

Answer 2

You first need to see if vim is compiled with clipboard support, run vim --version | grep clip and see if there is a + or - in front of clipboard and xterm-clipboard.

If it has clipboard support, copying from and pasting into the * or + registers should use the system/X11 clipboards, so "*yy would copy a line and "*p would paste it.

In Ubuntu 10.10 you can install vim-gnome to have clipboard support compiled in.

Answer 3

have a try :

"+y   and    "+p

this works for me, on Ubuntu.

Answer 4

The default VIM in Ubuntu is vim-tiny, which is not compiled for system clipboard support. You need to install the full VIM and the Gnome GUI to get clipboard support:

sudo at-get install vim-full vim-gnome

After you install those two packages you can then use the commands that Akira and wliao mentioned.

Answer 5

yank to the clipboard register:

 "*y

paste from the clipboard register:

 "*p

for more information:

 :help clipboard