Introduction

When you install vim, a usual requirement as with all text editors is the ability to copy to/from system clipboard so you can lets say, copy something into your vim session from firefox or vice versa, however copy pasting in terminal editors is not as straight forward as with GUI editors. In vim if you want to copy something into an auxilary space (anticipating it would be used later, so you can paste from this auxilary space) is achieved by registers.

The register that represents system clipboard is + register. Anything that you copy into this register is available in system clipboard.

How to use registers to copy/paste

To copy a text into a register, select it in visual mode and press "<register_name>y to yank the contents into the given register. And to paste the contents of a particular register at current position, use "<register_name>p.

To use system clipboard, you just have to substitute “+” for register name in the above commands.

clipboard support

But the + register wont work unless you have clipboard support with your vim installation. By default there is no clipboard support in vim.

To check if your vim installation has clipboard support use:

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$ vim --version | grep clipboard
+clipboard         +keymap            +printer           +vertsplit
+ex_extra          +mouse_netterm     +syntax            +xterm_clipboard

or inside of vim, you can run the command:

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:echo has('clipboard')

If the output is 0, your installation doesnt have clipboard support.

Compiling vim

Now there are 2 solutions to this problem:

  1. Either install gvim:
  2. Or compile vim from sources with clipboard support

Let’s see how each of them can be done.

Install gvim

To install gvim run:

On Debian:

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sudo apt install vim-gtk

On Fedora

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sudo dnf install gvim

To compile vim with clipboard support

Below are the simple steps:

Step 1: Grab the sources

Clone the repository:

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git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git vim
cd vim

Step 2: Install dependencies

Install the required libraries and tools to build vim, for example gcc, x11 etc. Note that you only need them to compile vim and you are free to delete them once you are done.

On Debian:

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sudo apt install build-essential libx11-dev libncurses5-dev

On Fedora:

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sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo yum install gcc
sudo yum groupinstall "X Software Development"
sudo dnf install libX11-devel ncurses-devel

Also, you need to remove the existing installation(if any).

On Debian

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sudo apt remove vim

On Fedora

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sudo dnf remove vim gvim

Step 3: Configure and Compile

Configure vim with features of your choice

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./configure \\
--enable-cscope \\
--enable-gui=auto \\
--enable-gtk2-check \\
--enable-gnome-check \\
--with-features=huge \\
--with-x

Then compile and install with:

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make
sudo make install

Conclusion

In this article we learned how can we compile vim with clipboard support, you can also tweak configuration according to your requirements. There are many configuration options available.