How to copy/paste from Vim in WSL

Question

I am trying to use Vim to locate and copy/paste some code I need to analyze and take notes on. I am using Debian, in a Windows WSL environment. That's what makes this tricky.

The regular "yank and put to global register" commands "+y and "*y commands didn't work.

On the other hand, the brute force approach where I just use the mouse to scrape the terminal text won't work either. Strangely, WSL terminal has mouse support, and Vim can track its movements, select in visual mode, etc. So Vim intercepts the selection command, and then there is nothing selected for ctrl-shift-c to copy into the Windows clipboard.

I know the WSL terminal supports copy and paste, and I can successfully do it if I cat my file to the screen, and copy and paste that using ctrl-shift-c and ctrl-v. But then I lose out on ease of navigation.

What's the best way to copy text out of Vim inside a WSL terminal and into the windows clipboard?

Answer 1

Answer is, do a vim visual selection then do the command:

:'<,'>w !clip.exe

This pipes the current selection out to the shell command clip.exe, which utilizes WSL's ability to execute Windows executables (even with a pipeline). Text piped to clip.exe goes to the Windows clipboard.

Also, this command saves the whole file to the clipboard (not the requirement):

 :w !clip.exe

Answer 2

Like romainl mentioned, clipboard is at X level. So the most important step is you need to have an X-server running on Windows, and you need to set DISPLAY variable on Linux to point to X-server. Then in neovim set clipboard=unnamedplus or vim set clipboard=unnamed to link to the system clipboard.

Follow this nice gist should make things work.

For me I use fish shell, the wsl specific logic becomes in your config.fish.

if uname -r | grep 'microsoft' > /dev/null 
  set -l LOCAL_IP (cat /etc/resolv.conf | grep nameserver | awk '{print $2}')
  set -xg DISPLAY $LOCAL_IP:0
end