Copying text outside of Vim with set mouse=a enabled

Question

After enabling set mouse=a, text copied inside of Vim will not paste outside of Vim. Does anybody know of a way to fix this?

Here, selecting text with the mouse turns on visual mode and disables the Copy option in the popup menu:

Answer 1

Press shift while selecting with the mouse. This will make mouse selection behave as if mouse=a was not enabled.

Note: this trick also applies to "middle button paste": if you want to paste in vim text that was selected outside, press shift while clicking the middle button. Just make sure that insert mode is activated when you do that (you may also want to :set paste to avoid unexpected effects).

OS X (mac): hold alt/option while selecting (source)

Answer 2

Use ", +, y after making a visual selection. You shouldn’t be using the terminal’s copy command anyway, because that copies what the terminal sees instead of the actual content. Here is what this does:

• ",+ tells Vim to use the register named + for the next delete, yank or put. The register named + is a special register, it is the X11 clipboard register. (On other systems, you would use * instead, I think, see :help clipboard and :help x11-selection)
• y is the yank command, which tells Vim to put the selection in the register named previously.

You could map it like this:

:vmap <C-C> "+y

And then highlight something with the mouse and press Control-C to copy it.

This feature only works when Vim has been compiled with the +xterm_clipboard option. Run vim --version to find out if it has.

Answer 3

Instead of set mouse=a use set mouse=r in .vimrc

Answer 4

On OSX use fn instead of shift.

Answer 5

In Ubuntu, it is possible to use the X-Term copy & paste bindings inside VIM (Ctrl-Shift-C & Ctrl-Shift-V) on text that has been hilighted using the Shift key.

Answer 6

Another OSX-Mac option is to uncheck View->Allow Mouse Reporting (or press ⌘-R to toggle it.) This allows you to toggle between mouse interaction and mouse selecting, which might be useful when selecting and copy/pasting a few bits because you don't have to hold a modifier key to do it.

Note for Multiline with line numbers:

I usually have line numbers enabled so this will also copy the line numbers if you select multiple lines. If you want to copy multiple lines without the line numbers disable the numbers with :set nonu and then you can :set nu to re-enable them after you're done copying.

Answer 7

You can use :set mouse& in the vim command line to enable copy/paste of text selected using the mouse. You can then simply use the middle mouse button or shiftinsert to paste it.

Answer 8

I accidently explained how to switch off set mouse=a, when I reread the question and found out that the OP did not want to switch it off in the first place. Anyway for anyone searching how to switch off the mouse (set mouse=) centrally, I leave a reference to my answer here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/506723/194822

Answer 9

Compilation settings that vim was compiled with, are part of the issue. vim --version shows these.

In OSX, the default vim has -clipboard But you need +clipboard

On osx you can and apparently generally should, use macvim. You can do brew cask install macvim That one has +clipboard.

Them you'll have two vims.

~$ ls -l /usr/bin/vim   <--- default vim
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1745984 15 Jul  2017 /usr/bin/vim

~$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/vim   <-- macvim, installed recently via that mentioned brew line. 
lrwxr-xr-x  1 apple  admin  42 16 May 23:32 /usr/local/bin/vim -> /Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/bin/mvim
~$ 

running vim will run macvim 'cos /usr/local/bin should be before /usr/bin in the path, though you can check with which vim.

running vim(to run macvim), is fine but you may want to map vi to macvim 'cos otherwise running vi stays at the default vim! You can rewrite or delete(with rm) and recreate the vi sym link, with ln. And to do that without an 'operation not permitted" error, you have to (temporarily) disable SIL. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/208478/how-do-i-disable-system-integrity-protection-sip-aka-rootless-on-macos-os-x .

macvim has +clipboard as shown by vim --version

Here is a working ~/.vim/vimrc with just the required lines.

:set mouse=a
:map <leader>c "+y
:map <leader>v "+p

The default leader key is backslash.

I read a suggestion that one should use the leader key.. (certainly control has many keys already in use, so the suggestion was to not use control. I don't know if that applies to command key too, but anyhow).

With that mentioned mapping, \c will do "+y which will copy from the register known as +, to the clipboard. And \v will paste from the register known as +.

So that's a copy/paste that works between windows.

Another OS may require "* rather than "+

Answer 10

Holding shift while copying and pasting with selection worked for me

Answer 11

Add set clipboard=unnamed to your .vimrc. So it will use the clipboard register '*' instead of the unnamed register for all yank, delete, change and put operations (note it does not only affect the mouse).

The behavior of register '*' depends on your platform and how your vim has been compiled (or if you use neovim).

If it does not work, you can try with set clipboard=unnamedplus, but this option only makes sense on X11 systems (and gvim therefore).

Answer 12

If you are using, Putty session, then it automatically copies selection. If we have used "set mouse=a" option in vim, selecting using Shift+Mouse drag selects the text automatically. Need to check in X-term.

Answer 13

em... Keep pressing Shift and then click the right mouse button

Answer 14

Also worth mentioning, by having set mouse=nvi, when doing a selection and then pressing : <ESC> you will get the mouse selection copied to the primary selection clipboard (equivalent to a "*y).

Reference: help mouse

Main advantage of this method is the fact that if you have multiple vertical splits, it will only select from the current buffer. Using <Shift> as mentioned in the main answer, will, in this case, copy from all 3 files at the same time which is not exactly what one would want, expect or need.

Answer 15

In ESC mode, when set mouse=a, select the text using mouse. This would enable the visual mode in vim. Then you can press 'y' to yank the selected text and 'p' to paste it wherever you want. This happens only within vim.