Install Vim with +clipboard support but without Gvim?

Question

My distribution comes with a minimal version of Vim. vim --version returns -clipboard, so the * and + registers interact (copy/paste) with the primary and clipboard do not work.

The resources I've found suggest installing Gvim to solve that, e.g. vim-athena or vim-gtk3 packages in Debian, but I will never use it.

Can I get Vim with clipboard but with no GUI?

Answer 1

Building Vim from the source with the right flags is the general solution.

git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
cd vim/src
./configure --with-x=yes --disable-gui

The last command will probably raise an error message, which means you need to install dependencies. Experienced users know how to proceed, but if it's your first time on this, bad news is there isn't a magic solution, you need to track down the dependencies with your package manager or a search engine and keep trying the last line. In Debian and Ubuntu,

apt build-dep vim

will solve a great deal of those.

Once ./configure succeeds,

make -j9

and if all the dependencies were satisfied, you can finally install it, but first uninstall your current Vim package, if any. As root,

apt remove vim  #for Debian/Ubuntu
make install

See also: Installing Vim help page.

Answer 2

If you don't mind having gvim installed you can run gvim in commandline mode with gvim -v. Then you should have a version of commandline vim able to access the keyboard.

Also if gvim is invoked as vim it will act like it was invoked as gvim -v, so if you do something like this:

mkdir -p ~/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/gvim ~/bin/vim
echo "PATH=~/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc

That will create a symlink to gvim under the name of vim and put it in the path before anything else. That way when vim is launched it will run gvim in commandline mode, which should clipboard support without a GUI

Finally if you have root access and this is an debian/ubuntu system you can run:

sudo update-alternatives --config vim

And then select vim.gtk3 or vim.athena

Answer 3

I have the same need: have vim without gui (gvim)
I used before vim-gnome under ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic).
Recently, I switch to ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) and vim-gnome package are no more available and it seems only vim with GUI like vim-gtk3 has clipboard option management.

I switched to neovim which have clipboard option (to manage with operating system clipboard), and basically have no GUI.