How to automatically perform a command after yanking text [Vim wayland clipboard]

Question

I want to copy contents of the recently used " register automatically into my system clipboard after a yank command.

The way I achieve this now is by nnoremap <C-@> :call system("wl-copy", @")<CR>.

wl-copy is a Command-line copy/paste utilities for Wayland and it will copy the input you give it to system clipboard.

What my mapping above achieves is

1. take the contents of the " register,

   • denoted by the @" argument

2. and pass contents of @" as an argument to the system wl-copy function

   • shown by :call system("wl-copy", @").

But it requires me to press Ctrl + @ when I want to populate my system clipboard with contents of the " register.

How can I automatically execute :call system("wl-copy", @") after a yank command successfully finishes (I'd like to preserve y{motion} but not have to continuously poll to see if the " register changed.

Other solutions that achieve this effect are welcome.

Answer 1

You can use a TextYankPost autocmd to trigger the copy to system clipboard whenever text is yanked into a register.

A very simple version of that is:

augroup wayland_clipboard
  au!
  au TextYankPost * call system("wl-copy", @")
augroup END

This will trigger the operation whenever a yank into any register happens, which is a bit wasteful but probably not too bad... You can refine it by inspecting which register was yanked into from the v:event special variable.

See :help TextYankPost and :help v:event for more details.