A Vim / Neovim plugin to copy text to the system clipboard using the ANSI OSC52 sequence.
The plugin wraps a piece of text inside an OSC52 sequence and writes it to Vim's stderr. When your terminal detects the OSC52 sequence, it will copy the text into the system clipboard.
This is totally location-independent, you can copy text from anywhere including from remote SSH sessions. The only requirement is that the terminal must support the sequence. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the state of OSC52 integration in popular terminal emulators:
Terminal | OSC52 support |
---|---|
alacritty | yes |
far2l | yes |
foot | yes |
gnome terminal (and other VTE-based terminals) | not yet |
hterm | yes |
iterm2 | yes |
kitty | yes |
konsole | not yet |
qterminal | not yet |
rxvt | yes |
st | yes (but needs to be enabled, see here) |
terminal.app | no, but see workaround |
tmux | yes |
urxvt | yes (with a script, see here) |
wezterm | yes |
windows terminal | yes |
xterm.js (Hyper terminal) | not yet |
Feel free to add terminals to this list by submitting a pull request.
With vim-plug for instance:
Plug 'ojroques/vim-oscyank', {'branch': 'main'}
If you are using tmux, run these steps first: enabling OSC52 in
tmux. Then make sure
set-clipboard
is set to on
: set -s set-clipboard on
. See :h oscyank-tmux
for more details.
Add this to your Vim config:
nmap <leader>c <Plug>OSCYankOperator
nmap <leader>cc <leader>c_
vmap <leader>c <Plug>OSCYankVisual
Using these mappings:
- In normal mode, <leader>c is an operator that will copy the given text to the clipboard.
- In normal mode, <leader>cc will copy the current line.
- In visual mode, <leader>c will copy the current selection.
For Neovim check out nvim-osc52. Or add this to your Neovim config:
vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>c', '<Plug>OSCYankOperator')
vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>cc', '<leader>c_', {remap = true})
vim.keymap.set('v', '<leader>c', '<Plug>OSCYankVisual')
The available options with their default values are:
let g:oscyank_max_length = 0 " maximum length of a selection
let g:oscyank_silent = 0 " disable message on successful copy
let g:oscyank_trim = 0 " trim surrounding whitespaces before copy
let g:oscyank_osc52 = "\x1b]52;c;%s\x07" " the OSC52 format string to use
See :h oscyank-config
for more details.
The following commands are also available:
:OSCYank(text)
: copy texttext
:OSCYankRegister(register)
: copy text from registerregister
For instance, to automatically copy text that was yanked into register +
:
autocmd TextYankPost *
\ if v:event.operator is 'y' && v:event.regname is '+' |
\ execute 'OSCYankRegister +' |
\ endif