This is a Vim plugin that exposes a cy mapping in Visual mode and a
cy{motion} mapping in Normal mode which both attempt to yank the
selected/moved-over text and pipe it (via ssh if necessary) to the
pbcopy command on a Mac OS X client. What does this mean? It means you can
use cy wherever you'd normally use y and have that text available in
your Mac OS X system clipboard, whether you're working locally or remotely.
It also performs a simple y yank operation on your selection so you'll
have it in the default " yank register as well.
If you don't have a preferred installation method, I recommend installing pathogen.vim, and then simply copy and paste:
cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone https://github.com/ahw/vim-pbcopy.git
Use cy{motion} to copy text to the Mac OSX system clipboard or hit cy
after selecting text in Visual mode. In the background it is simply running
running
echo -n "whatever text you copied" | pbcopyYou can configure the local pbcopy command in your ~/.vimrc file:
~/.vimrc
let g:vim_pbcopy_local_cmd = "pbcopy"
Clipper is an OS X 'launch agent' that runs in the background providing a service that exposes the local clipboard to tmux sessions and other processes running both locally and remotely. ... We can use it from any process, including Vim
Source: https://github.com/wincent/clipper/blob/master/README.md
Clipper listens for tcp data on a select localhost port, and puts all
input it receipes on the system clipboard. This is useful for both local and
remote use. Locally, using clipper rather than pbcopy circumvents known
problems with pbcopy and tmux. Remotely, you can forward a remote port
to the local clipper's port via an ssh reverse tunnel.
Clipper can be configured in a variety of ways. Here's what's worked for me.
brew install clipper(install Clipper)brew services start clipper(start the Clipper daemon)ssh -R 8377:localhost:8377 my.remote.host(set up SSH remote port forwarding)- Add the following to
~/.vimrcon the remote host:let g:vim_pbcopy_remote_cmd = "nc localhost 8377". If for some reason things still aren't working, you can debug Clipper in isolation by runningecho "hello from local machine" | nc localhost 8377on your local machine, and you can debug the port forwarding setup by runningecho "hello from remote machine" | nc localhost 8377from the remote machine.
Nothing changes except you need to set the Vim global variable
g:vim_pbcopy_remote_cmd variable in your ~/.vimrc file to your preferred
way of running pbcopy on your local machine.
~/.vimrc
let g:vim_pbcopy_remote_cmd = "ssh your-mac-laptop.example.com pbcopy"
This will pipe the copied text to your Mac client's pbcopy over SSH.
echo -n "whatever text you copied" | ssh your-mac-laptop.example.com pbcopyThis assumes that you have an SSH server running on your laptop, of course. Note: I haven't tested this using password-based SSH logins (my configuration uses SSH keys).
See Option #1 above for other remote usage possiblities.
There are some inconsistencies around the way backslashes are escaped on
different systems. Try copying some text with \ and \n characters. If
you're getting incorrect output when you then try to paste that text somewhere,
see the table below for how to remedy.
| If you copied this | and pasted this | add this to ~/.vimrc |
|---|---|---|
| console.log('some\nthing'); | console.log('some\nthing'); | Nothing! It Just Works™ |
| console.log('some\nthing'); | console.log('some thing'); |
let g:vim_pbcopy_escape_backslashes = 1 |
| console.log('some\nthing'); | console.log('some\\nthing'); | let g:vim_pbcopy_escape_backslashes = 0 |