Copying to clipboard with clipboard=unnamed set

Question

In the ~/.vimrc the clipboard has been enabled:

set clipboard=unnamed

But after hitting v for Visual

and then hitting y (yank) then escape there is no contents in the clipboard.

What else needs to be done?

Are you really pressing Esc before y? Because that wil cancel the visual mode selection. — Rich, Feb 20 '18 at 22:27
Nice observation: I corrected the post and included screenshot of yanked message. — StephenBoesch, Feb 20 '18 at 22:46

Rich · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-20 23:07:45Z

1

Using clipboard=unnamed requires that your copy of Vim has system clipboard support built in. You can check this with the command:

echo has('clipboard')

Or simply by inspecting the output of:

:version

answered Feb 20 '18 at 23:07

Rich

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trying this out .. hold on – StephenBoesch Feb 20 '18 at 23:14
has(clipboard) returns 0 ;( So looks like I should reinstall vim. Thx for the heads up. – StephenBoesch Feb 20 '18 at 23:15
Update: I installed gnome-vim which returns 1 for has('clipboard') and saw 'yanked 7 lines` but still nothing in clipboard. – StephenBoesch Feb 20 '18 at 23:25
@javadba How are you checking? clipboard=unnamed will mean yanked text goes into the "PRIMARY selection". Possibly you want clipboard=unnamedplus instead? – Rich Feb 20 '18 at 23:45
tried the clipboard=unnamedplus: also does not work. I am running this in docker: and it appears the problem were a general one with the clipboard sharing with a macos host: stackoverflow.com/questions/41703070/… – StephenBoesch Feb 20 '18 at 23:51

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