Cut to the system clipboard from Vim on Ubuntu

Question

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 Beta and Vim that has come with it. I am trying to use Vim to copy the content of a text file to Chrome browser. I have tried +, * y and all its variants. I have tried to :set clipboard=unnamed and :set clipboard=unnamedplus. Not working. I am not trying to use xclip, or GVim or any of that. I tried with xclip (not a standard package in Ubuntu 12.04), but that too does not work, also too much effort.

How do I copy the text to the clipboard and then paste anywhere, like Chrome?

Answer 1

Your version of Vim doesn't support X, which is required for clipboard access. By default, Ubuntu ships several builds of vim and only the GUI variant supports clipboard access. I always recompile vim from source so that a single vim (with symlinks for gvim etc) supports everything required (including :gui to switch from command line to GUI version). It's really very easy to do:

# Get the compile-dependencies of vim sudo apt-get build-dep vim # If you haven't got mercurial, get it sudo apt-get install mercurial # Get the source hg clone https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/ vim_source # Compile it cd vim_source ./configure \     --enable-perlinterp=dynamic \     --enable-pythoninterp=dynamic \     --enable-rubyinterp=dynamic \     --enable-cscope \     --enable-gui=auto \     --enable-gtk2-check \     --enable-gnome-check \     --with-features=huge \     --with-x \     --with-compiledby="Your Name <[email protected]>" \     --with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.7/config make && sudo make install 

That will install it in /usr/local, so make sure that's in your PATH before /usr and it will be used instead of the Ubuntu versions.

Answer 2

The output from vim --version should show something like this:

Huge version with GTK2-GNOME GUI.  Features included (+) or not (-): 

and further down in the output you should see stuff like +Xll:

+vreplace +wildignore +wildmenu +windows +writebackup +X11 -xfontset +xim  +xsmp_interact +xterm_clipboard -xterm_save  

That means your console vim can copy/paste to/from the X11 clipboard.

Try apt-get install vim-gtk