· software-development vim

Vim: Copying to and retrieving from the clipboard

My memory when it comes to remembering how to get text to and from Vim via the clipboard is pretty bad so I thought I’d try summarising what I know and see if that works out any better.

We can access the system clipboard via the '+' buffer so the commands revolve around that.

Copying to the clipboard

To copy the whole file to the clipboard we can use this command:

:%y+

Or if we want to get the data between lines 4 and 10 then we could do:

:4,10y+

If we want just the current line the following will work:

:.y+

If we want to copy lines via visual mode, we would use 'v' to go into that and select which lines we want to copy followed by:

"+y

Retrieving from the clipboard

Retrieving data from the clipboard is a case of accessing the '+' buffer.

Therefore to paste whatever’s in the clipboard into a file we’d do this:

"+p

If we wanted to paste it just before the current position of the cursor then we’d do this instead:

"+P
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