copy paste in iterm, vim

Question

I use iterm in Mac as my command line terminal. In iterm I use tmux as the terminal manager. When I open my code files in Vim copying has become painful in this. To copy text in vim I need to hold "option" key and then select the text. When holding option there are multiple issues: 1) I am unable to scroll while in select mode 2) When I split my terminal into 2 panes, select using option copies across panes making it tough.

I am not sure about the reason for this issue and where to find a workaround. Could anyone help me with it?

Answer 1

You cannot depend on iTerm's clipboard support because it will not know anything about Vim's or tmux's splits. Use native Vim copy instead.

:help v
:help V
:help y
:help d
:help "*
:help clipboard

So e.g. in order to copy two lines, you can do "*2yy (to clipboard register, two line yank); or you can mark something using visual mode, then just "*y (to clipboard register, yank). If you want the clipboard register to be always automatically used unless another register is specified, you can add the following to your .vimrc:

set clipboard+=unnamed

Then a simple 2yy will copy two lines, and you can just paste it in iTerm or any other application.