Copy and Paste to/from Vim from/to Other Programs!

[@Alendrik]

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!

[@RajivLochanPanda]

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! 🙏

[@SArthur221]

5:23 C-v is normally block visual select, which i use a ton xD

[@Dusta_Rhymes]

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

[@finnianquail8881]

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.

[@bratezoran2102]

@@finnianquail8881 WHO THE F CARES I CALL IT LINUX STOP ME

[@minhajshovon9789]

@@finnianquail8881 here comes RMS agent :3

[@rogzinho]

Obey koomer

[@conceptrat]

@@finnianquail8881 I hear ya but could it not be Linux+GNU as the kernel is loaded first right? 😬

[@djfl58mdlwqlf]

not sure why it doesn't work for me.. using ubuntu tried V "+y to yank (from server) and when I do ctrl+v on browser (local pc) it won't work... won't work from local vim to local browser also..

[@prahe86]

You're a great teacher.

[@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx]

yeah, agree. he explain things easly

[@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx]

me too

[@ayushmishra6077]

@@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx lol

[@DFsdf3443d]

ah the era of me closing vim, opening notepad to copy something over, and then reopening vim is finally over. Thank you sir

[@chrest1konto29]

Sabaton ... a man of culture!

[@SimpleLangSolution]

Where have you been my entire life? This channel man. This channel right here. Damn, it's so good.

[@mkd1113]

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.

[@kant859600]

After so many tutorials on internet I found this solution on your channel. Thank you soo much man.

[@outlierjahd7910]

me too

[@ViniciusProvenzano]

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.

[@qwertyasdf7615]

neovim comes with sys clipboard access as well

[@xerneastrainer8111]

Novim comes with bloat as well.

[@stv3qbhxjnmmqbw835]

@@xerneastrainer8111 I like neovim

[@memoryman51]

The bloat police are on the case!

[@alcesmir]

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).

[@Comrade_Tux]

Wow, You not only answered what I searched, but also taught me a lot about copying and pasting inside vim. Thanks.

[@4.0.4]

The editor I use has these keyboard bindings, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, I use them a lot.

[@wesleyjrz]

lol

[@tuananhdo1870]

what is you editor are you using: sublime or vscode?

[@kaksisve4012]

​@@tuananhdo1870 Provably ED. :D

[@itsmith32]

@@tuananhdo1870 Notepad, of course:)))

[@jamescritchlow3445]

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

[@MuhammadUsman-qf7cl]

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.

[@christbaumer]

is used for block visual by default.

[@MatheusCopyright]

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

[@-XArchLinuxEnjoyerX-]

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

[@macfhlannchadharonan4668]

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.

[@delta-a17]

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?

[@HaydonRyan]

Great straight forward explanation. Personally I have a leader key (space) and then have the same vim bindings as normal - but space put's it in the "space" of my desktop. :)

[@GooogleGoglee]

Question: How can you move the content / value of a register to a different register??

[@tristanfulford5562]

The line he shows towards the end with :let @+=@* is making the +register equal the same value as the *register

[@GooogleGoglee]

@@tristanfulford5562 thank you for your answer. So suppose I want to swap the content of the register "a and register "b, how can I do it with one command?

[@tristanfulford5562]

@@GooogleGoglee I'm not sure what you're trying to do but ill assume you want to preserve the data from both, so id do :let @c=@a, :let @a=@b, :let @b=@c. There may well be a command to do that easily but I'm just guessing here There's good resources from Google like vimwiki or you can try :h register if the above doesn't do what you want

[@GooogleGoglee]

@@tristanfulford5562 thank you Tristan

[@pnuema1.618]

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.

[@janekiii]

read a website that teaches me the same syntax but the lack of context is confusing and this video helps me. TY!

[@xbz24]

holy shit. cristal clear like water, thank you dude. FUCK YEAH now I can copy paste from my browser love you dawg

[@fernabianer1898]

Very well made. I'll rewatch this one later and play around with it. Thank you Luke!

[@romjan4869]

in manjaro, you can't install both gvim and vim together. Package manager will tell you " vim and gvim" are in conflict.

[@Eliotime3000]

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.

[@yoshi314]

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.

[@ProtoForte]

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.

[@ReneHoffmann194]

Why do you mark the whole line and yank it afterwards? Use "Y" instead of this ... or with registers: "aY BTW: I'm using :set clipboard=unnamedplus to copy stuff the the x11 clipboard and insert from it. Works pretty well for me.

[@GooogleGoglee]

Thanks Question: How can you move the content / value of a register to a different register??

[@ThomasCKFuller]

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

[@Chalisque]

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.

[@sdnnvs]

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?

[@desktorp]

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."

[@hacerdemirel9833]

This is what I was looking for by years. Thanks.

[@youngun550]

What does

[@jmisc]

Is the Linux option the same as Mac? what will be the key binding for Mac?

[@ali-om4uv]

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!

[@TheEbbemonster]

Great explanation! Unfortunately it is a nightmare to get working on WSL :(

[@NozomiFurikaeru]

How can I add a keybind to the "*y or "+y in my .vimrc? I copy what Luke put in the video but vim doesn't seem to recognize it.

[@twerkingduck1275]

My +/* registers weren't working because I didn't have -clipboard and -xterm_clipboard supported, so I found out that installing the vim-gtk package fixed it.

[@1052rajan]

Hey dude, this is not working for me as I am running Ubuntu through VBox. Unable to copy from a text file to Vim. NOTE: I have installed Guest additions on it to share the clipboard between Win11 and Ubuntu. Vim is unable to access the clipboard I guess.

[@anupamaiyengar2559]

How to copy large vim files or multiple pages from vim to a notepad or notes app

[@SandeepSharma-ig9gw]

Is there a way to yank text from remote server to local win10 without using mouse? I tried above and it works locally on mac but when i ssh to remote server it does not work.

[@jerodburnett3680]

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

[@conceptrat]

That's what happens when you Bash your Head with a |, Fsck 😀

[@idle_fish_by_the_shore]

watch data wrangling missing semesters

[@spellman3809]

What icon font you use in your bar?

[@erickperes0495]

Teacher, I can't paste values from external source of vim to vim. Why? Addtional Information: I am doing that in a Debian server through SSH.

[@grantbarthelmes1950]

One of the many heros of the internet

[@TheHelvetican]

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.

[@mrchuz0]

Which is the markdown language are you using?

[@honduwave]

This doesn't work for me in Void, so I installed vim-x11, as suggested by a commenter.

[@TechnoBoomer]

Hello Luke. Thanks for this video but the trick does not seem to work on my machine (Fedora 30 + vim 8.1.1359)...

[@diegocastillo6470]

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

[@AbhinavKumarJha-j4x]

V"+y not working in my vim editor, have gvim installed

[@VoylinsLife]

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 ^^"

[@ezeth8576]

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?

[@JohnInnocentSmyth]

does neovim have this by default or do i still need to get gvim inaddition?

[@Chalisque]

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.)

[@MM-doremifaso]

I like your music, sabaton forever! 🤘

[@jordanmoravenov]

Thank you! Everything I needed I learned in this video.

[@gjermundification]

"+y and "+p with visual mode obviously, but isn't this video incomplete without a yank from regular vim's normal mode? Something like "+y4j?

[@pacogarcia3911]

What is the key bindings streaming tool guys please ??? thkx !

[@CyberDruga]

well, i just put this on my vimrc: set clipboard=unnamedplus now every yank/cut/replace goes directly to the system clipboard

[@jean-kevin1264]

omg thank you so much!!!!!!

[@loveleshsinghsisodiya5960]

Can you please explain to me this I am not getting it

[@CyberDruga]

@@loveleshsinghsisodiya5960 certainly. "unnamedplus" is your system clipboard. :set clipboard=unnamedplus means that everything you copy/delete will go to your system clipboard. It's the same as "+y for every copy, and "+d for every deletion, but without typing "+ at the start.

[@morgansippel2057]

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

[@kenny116116]

In Fedora, I had to install gvim and use add "alias vim='gvim -v' " in my .bashrc.

[@khai-chuongtrinh1429]

what if your vim doesn't have +clipboard or +xterm_clipboard enabled? I have macvim installed from .dmg file. I searched and seems like one would need to re-install using homebrew to get this functionality. Do you know of another way to enable the clipboard functionality?

[@ThreelionsSFIV]

In linux you can use xclip/xsel to emulate clipboard yank/paste. search for similar solution for Mac.

[@RobertCastilloC]

What means "vnore" why the Ctrl+V just have "map"

[@miguelangelmeditux8785]

muchas gracias por el video, soy nuevo con Vim y me ha ayudado mucho

[@DavidLee-jd5ot]

lol ctrl+v is visual block ,even i didnt noticed when i was trying to edit a column but ctrl+v kept pasting instead of going visual block mode haha

[@binbashbuddy]

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)

[@shadowleague2486]

Actually you only need vim-runtime, not gvim.

[@JS-kr7zy]

gvim can't be installed because it conflicts with vim. Rip.

[@davidh.4944]

It wasn't completely clear in the video, but installing the gvim package also provides you with a version of cli vim that has x-clipboard support compiled in. You can safely remove the original.

[@fabriziobertoglio7342]

amazing. I m trying this since 2 years :)

[@Klblaz]

I didn't know gvim has the clipboard build in. I remember compiling vim from scratch to get clipboard working.

[@ThreelionsSFIV]

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.

[@Klblaz]

@@ThreelionsSFIV I know that now, I use gvim for pretty much everything, it's much better than TUI vim.

[@ibrahimKaraagac]

Luke I enjoy your videos and watch every one of. Thank You.

[@cscidev]

Straight to the point. Useful. Liked and subscribed

[@slajmlord3211]

To move the cursor after the paste, I would suggest gp rather than capital p.

[@sourabhjain8112]

Not working on Fedora.

[@anirudhrawat7584]

Thank you for this. Helped a lot.

[@kevingrande1324]

does it work if I have installed neovim?

[@Argletrough]

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]

Wow; `NeoVim`. Never heard of it. Is it a `Wiki`?

[@Argletrough]

@@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.

[@md.shazidalhasan6726]

I am using nvim and this is not working.

[@ziggyspaz]

Thanks for letting me learn something new today

[@longlostwraith5106]

Wouldn't collide with the trigger for visual mode?

[@conceptrat]

You could use map! instead of map which applies only to insert and command mode “:“. Also someone mentioned that using , that's Ctrl-Shift-v also works. As well as . Although I haven't tested those yet they would make sense as that's the normal way to copy and paste text in the terminal. And finally I'd recommend using “+P instead of “+p as Like mentioned as it follows what most of us are used to when pasting.

[@Dangnguyenhai141213]

It's not works with me at all.

[@JK-pi6ji]

can't really install gvim on a server..

[@georgiosroumeliotis4383]

Why should I learn Vim?

[@virgiliomurilloochoa2884]

hey so this works on windows aswell?

[@miika35476]

Thank you! I love vim, but missing that copy paste thing drove me crazy. :D

[@kieuquangtuan1062]

But gvim conflicts with vim, how can I deal with it?

[@imnotblackpinkfanimtheirai5300]

just uninstall vim and install gvim. bạn có thể dùng vim bình thường mà k cần cài đặt vim vì gvim nó có vim sẵn trong đó rồi

[@NaurisMich]

lol, :: gvim and vim are in conflict (vim-minimal). Remove vim? [y/N]

[@hakety93]

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

[@MarioPerez-yi2tw]

How to uncomment a line? please

[@il2286]

To paste into vim i usually do :setpaste > i > ctrl + v > :setnopaste And to copy text from vim v > "+y > ctrl + v I don't use gvim, neovim...

[@loveleshsinghsisodiya5960]

I need help

[@jeffraylazo8173]

(CTRL + V + End) to highlight the entire line of text and (SHIFT + "+y) to copy it in clipboard I'm using Linux by the way. :)

[@toby.2a]

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.

[@sflux4593]

Why not just g? If you know the line number say 100, you can easily go to it by typing "100g"

[@sachinwalunjakar8854]

Thanks for making this video. Very helpful.

[@nrth3rnlb]

What's the name of the line number mode?

[@Zandman26]

set nu relativenumber