Getting copying and pasting to behave sanely when working with the terminal has been a constant struggle, probably ever since I started working with PuTTY, slackware and what must have been Windows 98.

These days my environment consists of OS X 10.10, tmux, iTerm2 and well, Vim has never gone away. Neither have my issues with copy-pasting though. It seems that every time I have a solution, a few months later a cog in the machine changes and breaks the whole set-up again, which then takes me months to fix due to my lazyness.

I finally took the time again to look into this, and figured I should share. So this is the December 2014 solution! Keep in mind that in January 2015 this may no longer work though…

iTerm2

First: iTerm2. iTerm2 has a setting that allows terminal applications to access the clipboard.

This works through ANSI escape sequences, and you actually want this OFF. Before today I had this setting on, which kinda worked but it always truncated the clipboard, which made it completely frustrating for copy-pasting larger things such as logfiles.

So to repeat this, the “Allow clipboard access to terminal apps” must be OFF

tmux

OS X has two command-line utilities to interact with the clipboard, pbcopy and pbpaste . These utilities break when running inside of tmux.

To fix this, we need a small utility that can be installed using brew:

brew install reattach-to-user-namespace

If you would like to know exactly how this works and why it’s needed, or if you want to install this without using brew, the github project page has all the answers.

Bonus fact: this also fixes launchctl in tmux.

After this, we need to make a few modifications to your ~/.tmux.conf . Add the following lines:

# Copy-paste integration set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l bash" # Use vim keybindings in copy mode setw -g mode-keys vi # Setup 'v' to begin selection as in Vim bind-key -t vi-copy v begin-selection bind-key -t vi-copy y copy-pipe "reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy" # Update default binding of `Enter` to also use copy-pipe unbind -t vi-copy Enter bind-key -t vi-copy Enter copy-pipe "reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy" # Bind ']' to use pbpaste bind ] run "reattach-to-user-namespace pbpaste | tmux load-buffer - && tmux paste-buffer"

The previous lines sets up tmux correctly, and binds various copy and paste keys to use pbpaste and pbcopy.

The one thing I have not figured out here, is that I haven’t been able to get tmux mouse support with this. So if you want to copy and paste to the system clipboard, you need to do this with the keyboard short-cuts.

Know how to extend this feature to get mouse support? Do let me know!

Don’t forget to restart tmux or run:

tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf

To start using this new configuration.

Vim

Lastly, vim! It would be awesome if we can just ‘yank’ and paste using y and p from Vim as well.

This is rather easy. Open up your .vimrc , or .vim/vimrc file and simply add this line:

set clipboard = unnamed

However, this did not work with the Vim version that OS X shipped with (which is 7.3). To upgrade to 7.4, just use Homebrew again:

brew install vim

Sources

A big thank you to the sources. I got most of my information from the following links:

Bonus tmux feature

Add the following lines in ~/.tmux.conf to automatically open new windows and tabs in the directory from where you opened them: