Question or issue on macOS:
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Awareness that VIM is rather different from every text editor that you might have used (hello Sublime text!) Terminology. Command line: An interface for interacting with the operating system. Terminal: A command line interface to control the UNIX-based operating system that underlies the Mac. VIM: This is a contraction of Vi and IMproved. MacVim is version of popular Vim text editor for Mac OS X. It is a tool with a full bundle of features and it has the primitive graphical interface. The most important feature of the MacVim is standard shortcuts of OS X keyboard. It has a are transparent backgrounds along with full- screen mode which is very helpful for distraction-free coding. If you use bash on macOS, this is easiest done by editing your /.bashprofile file and adding the two lines export EDITOR=nano export VISUAL='$EDITOR' to the bottom of the file. If the file does not exist, you may create it. In Vim, the mode that the editor is in determines whether the alphanumeric keys will input those characters or move the cursor through the document. For example, many text editors and word processors require you to use the mouse to click a menu item or icon, or use the Ctrl-s hotkey combination, to save a file. Vim Text Editor Basics is a Tutorial on How to Use Vim on Linux / Mac / Unix. Learn the basics to navigate, edit, save, and exit a file using Vim.
I access a sever over ssh on which I run vim for editing files. When I try to yank text from vim into an editor locally on my mac (lion) either with y OR '+y it does not work. I end up with the text I copied last locally. It does work if I just use p within vim alright.
How to solve this problem?
Solution no. 1:
To expand on Ray's answer…
When you are using Vim on a remote server via SSH, everything you do in Vim is done on the remote server. The remote server and the remote Vim that you are running on it have zero practical knowledge of your local computer and its system clipboard.
Because of that, y will never put the yanked text in your local clipboard.
In order to copy a chunk of text from the remote Vim to your local machine's clipboard you have three options:
Select the text with your mouse and hit Cmd+C like in any Mac OS X application.
Obviously, it seems to be the easiest but it has at least three limitations: Powerpoint viewer 2010 mac.
It is limited to the current screen. If the text you want to yank is not displayed entirely you won't be able to copy all of it.
It doesn't play well with
set mouse=a. With this option, any attempt to select something with the mouse will result in a visual mode selection which can't be copied with Cmd+C. As a workaround, you can use Alt+mouse to select the text without entering visual mode or simply remove this setting from your remote~/.vimrc.Line numbers are copied as well.
Put the yanked text in a temporary file,
scpit to your local machine and usepbcopyto put it in your system clipboard.This solution seems to be a little convoluted but it works (and the problem itself is also a little bit convoluted). Over the years I've seen a lot of different implementations ranging from simple one liners to client/server setups. Here is one, feel free to google around for others.
Use X-forwarding to connect your local clipboard to the remote clipboard if available.
Solution no. 2:
Had this problem – log in from OSX over SSH to a linux box and cannot copy text from a file, opened with vim.
My workaround is :set mouse=i
By default mouse is enabled in all modes. When you set it to be enabled only in Insert mode you can scroll around and copy when you are not editing (normal mode) but when you start editing (by hitting the I or Insert key) and enter insert mode the mouse acts as cursor placement and you cannot copy from terminal. Sims online, free no download mac.
You can set that option in ~/.vimrc
See :help mouse for more information about the values you can set and the modes.
Solution no. 3:
Recover mac from external hard drive. My first answer on stackoverflow, but I feel it's a cool (albeit tiny) trick and it's worth posting. So here's what I do :
When the text is printed onto the terminal, I select all the text with my mouse (the mouse scroll works since we're on the terminal window). Then copy that text with Cmd+C and paste into my local text editor.
The only flaw with this trick is that it's impractical to use if your files are tens of thousands of lines long since selecting all the lines with your mouse would be a task in itself. But for a file of ~2k lines it works well.
Solution no. 4:
My go-to solution is to edit the file with vim from your local machine via scp.
This keeps your buffer local and makes it easy to copy to your local clipboard.
The other advantage is that you get to use your local vim setup (.vimrc settings, plugins, etc.)
Solution no. 5:
Yanking within vi in a terminal to which you ssh'd into copies the lines into vi's internal buffer on the remote machine, not into your Mac's clipboard.
Use your mouse. 🙂
Solution no. 6:
iTerm2 Shell Utilities come with it2copy which allows copying from a remote server to a client clipboard. Install Shell Utilities on the remote server and make sure you have Applications in terminal may access clipboard checked.
Then, go into visual mode, select the text and execute <,'>:w !it2copy
Solution no. 7:
Here's an update on the solution #2 from romainl. It creates and alias of the ssh command and launches the remotecopyserver if it's not running and installs the remotecopy(rclip) in the remote server. In short, you don't have to do anything except paste the code snippet below into your bash_profile.
Once the alias is activated, you can normally use ssh and whenever you need to copy to local clipboard from vim, use
to copy the whole file to clipboard
Vim Text Editor Mac
to copy selected lines from visual mode. You have to press 'Cmd+V' or 'Ctrl+V' whenever it asks for the secret key.
Bonus
For those who work on Vagrant, there's a wrapper vssh which will execute vagrant ssh but also launches and install the necessary components.
Reference
Latest code snippet here – https://gist.github.com/ningsuhen/7933b206b92fc57364b2
Caveats
The alias wraps the ssh command and there might be some unexpected issues. ssho is available if you need to execute ssh without the whole remotecopyserver thing. Alternatively, you can use the alias ssh2 and keep the ssh command as it is.
Solution no. 8:
One trick which i use often during copying vim text using mouse if number of lines get little over-flown my screen is to minimize (Cmd + ‘-‘) the text. 🙂 Minimize so much that you can not see by eyes but you can copy all the text in one go.
Vim Text Editor Mac Download
Solution no. 9:
On MacOS, when SSH from machine A to machine B and using vim in machine B, I add this to my .vimrc in machine B:
That way, in normal mode, if you copy something to * register, then type yr, the content of * register in [email protected]_B is copied to machine A's local clipboard, assuming you have setup Vim correctly with +clipboard and * register
Solution no. 10:
Or, from the terminal, write less [filename] to get it written to the terminal. Then start byt selecting with your mouse, while you hold down-arrow-key down. Then you can select the whole bunch.
Hope this helps!
