jabirali/vim-tmux-yank

Synchronize Vim, Tmux, and OS clipboards via OSC 52

Vim Tmux Yank

This is a simple plugin for synchronizing the clipboards of vim/nvim, tmux, and a variety of operating systems, even over remote connections. It does so via a terminal escape called OSC 52.

There are other ways to accomplish similar things; you can e.g. use xclip, wl-copy, clip.exe, pbcopy. However, this requires different utilities on different systems, and doesn't always work over ssh. Notably, many hosts disable X forwarding for security reasons, many headless servers don't have X installed, and Wayland or WSL users may not want an X server just to get basic clipboard functionality. OSC 52, in contrast, works transparently over ssh and across platforms.

Quickstart

This plugin assumes you use vim or nvim inside of tmux, and wish to synchronize your clipboards in tmux, vim/nvim, and your operating system. You can install this plugin using a standard vim plugin manager like vim-plug:

Plug 'jabirali/vim-tmux-yank'

Then enable OSC 52 on the tmux side, just add this to your tmux.conf:

set -g set-clipboard on

This is sufficient to integrate your vim and tmux clipboards. Some terminals like Alacritty set your operating system clipboard by default when an OSC 52 code is intercepted, others like iTerm reportedly require you to enable this feature in the settings. If you now yank text in vim (try e.g. Vy or yy), the yanked text should be available from your vim clipboard, tmux clipboard, and operating system clipboard. It should automatically work over ssh too.

This plugin lets you yank to your tmux and system clipboards, but you cannot paste via terminal escape codes. This is arguably a good thing: I don't mind servers I ssh into writing to my clipboard, but letting them read it is a privacy concern. Pasting content copied outside vim is perhaps best done using your terminal keyboard shortcut (I map it to Alt+p).

Acknowledgements

Almost all of this code was copied from Leeren's post on Reddit, so all credit should go to them. The only thing I added was the tmux tty check.

I tried some existing OSC-52 plugins, and none of them seemed to work on Neovim. According to Google, no-one else had wrapped this code as a plugin. To streamline things for other users like me, I therefore wrapped it as a plugin myself.