Clipboard in Neovim

Introduction

Neovim/Vim provides us with a brilliant yank/put (or copy/paste) system: y to yank contents to a register and p to put contents from a register, with multiple registers to select from.

However, there are some inconvenient:

1. Sync with the system clipboard
2. Sync when using SSH
3. Sync between WSL and host

This essay aims to deal with these problems.

Origin CLip

First of all, press y in normal mode in vim/nvim can yank the contents to a register, and p can put contents from a register to editor.

This is the simplest usage of origin clip. However what is the register?

Registers is a storage location where you can save text for later use

In nvim, there are 5 groups of registers:

1. Unnamed Register(“): This is the default register.
2. Number Registers(0-9): These registers store the last ten yanked or deleted texts.
3. Named Registers(a-z): These registers could be specified by press letter after ".
4. System Clipboard Registers (+ and *): These registers interact with the system clipboard.
5. Black Hole Register (_): This register drop all contents.

These register could be specified by press corresponding symbol after ". And if you do not specify, nvim would use unnamed register.

Thus, press "add would yank current line to the a register without override the default register, which means you can store many distinct contents at same time.

But the _ register is an exception: all contents yanked to it cannot be reused. It is just like a black hole; everything can go in, but nothing can get out (if you do not consider Hawking’s theory).

System CLipboard

As metioned above, there are two system clipboard registers used to sync with system clipboard. But it is a bit of hassle. Usually, I use this command to make it conveniently.

vim.opt.clipboard:append 'unnamedplus'

OSC52

If we would like to sync with remote machine when we use ssh to connect. There are more work to do.

Nvim provides a OSC52 clipboard for users (:help clipboard-osc52 could find the document), OSC52 is ANSI escape sequence that allows user to copy text to the system clipboard even from a remote SSH session. Add this snip to your configuration.

vim.g.clipboard = {
    name = 'OSC 52',
    copy = {
        ['+'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').copy '+',
        ['*'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').copy '*',
    },
    paste = {
        ['+'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').paste '+',
        ['*'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').paste '*',
    },
}

This code custom clipboard to replace + and * registers.

WSL