When I'm confronting a bug of a plugin and an error message pops up like this one:
E5018: Error executing lua ...
and if I want to report this bug, I always have to type this error message manually. How can I copy the error message into my clipboard in order to paste it on github?
You can typically see the error messages produced by plug-ins using the :messages command.
If you'd like to put those messages into a Vim buffer, so that you can copy them to the clipboard from there, you can use the following command:
:put =execute('messages')
This uses the execute() function to capture output of an Ex command, then the expression register "= to use that in a register context and finally the :put command to append the contents of that register to the current buffer.
See :help :messages, :help execute(), :help "= and :help :put for more details.
I combined @filbranden's answer with the answer to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59474914/how-to-copy-the-error-message-when-vim-start
and came up with this leader shortcut that copies the last message displayed by Vim to the clipboard - uses @D.BenKnoble's suggestion from the comments:
nnoremap <leader>m :let @*=trim(execute('1messages')) \| echo 'copied' <cr>
nnoremap <leader>m :let @* = trim(execute('1messages')) <bar> echo 'copied'<cr> (the main difference is the <bar>)?
.vimrc I get E121: Undefined variable: cr - I can't figure out why <cr> is accepted in my version but not yours. btw I'm using MacVim, maybe it's a subtle difference
<CR>, but I also forgot I had to escape the |
| is what made it work - didn't matter whether <CR> was capitalized. will update the answer