I m trying to figure out how to get vim inside PuTTY (no xterm involved) to interact with the Windows clipboard.
My research so far indicates it s not possible. xterm has clipboard-interaction terminal escape sequences, but they re disabled by default in xterm. They re probably not implemented at all in PuTTY. This is probably for security reasons: you don t want a remote system to have full access to your clipboard.
I m not sure if that s what vim s xterm_clipboard
feature is supposed to use, anyway. My searching so far only turns up people complaining about it not being enabled, or talking about how to get a vim that has it enabled, not how it s actually implemented. The best I ve found is this guide which mentions it, but doesn t say anything that would pin it down to escape sequences vs. X selection vs. X clipboard. (Yes, X11 has a selection and a separate clipboard. Some ways of copying only set one or the other.)
Vim s clipboard support talks directly to the X server. On a Linux desktop, with vim in a terminal (Konsole in my case) :"*dd
does put the lines into the clipboard.
With
(unset DISPLAY; strace -s256 -o /dev/pts/18 vim some_file.txt)
vim doesn t have an X server to talk to. (pts18
is the tty of another terminal window.) I thought vim might use xterm escape sequences to set the clipboard, but it doesn t. There is no write(1, ...)
system call with the whole region, so it s clearly not trying to use an escape sequence to put the region in the clipboard via xterm.
I ran this inside a Konsole with TERM=xterm
, on Ubuntu 15.04. I also tried inside a real xterm
.
Oh, xterm disables GetSelection/SetSelection
by default. Maybe with this enabled, vim would try to use it? IDK if this helps, though, because PuTTY would also have to support it, which is unlikely.