Linux – How to copy / paste from the system clipboard in Tmux in xterm on Linux

linux

I'd like to copy into and paste from the system (X11) clipboard when making a selection in Tmux and I'd like to bind these actions to the mouse; left click for copy and middle click for paste.

Best Answer

For older versions of Tmux (<1.5) or other systems, try tmux-yank. For this specific case, however, Tmux very nicely integrates with the system.

In your ~/.tmux.conf, add:

set -g mouse on
set -g set-clipboard external
bind -T root MouseUp2Pane paste

to enable mouse support, copying to the system clipboard, and bind a middle-click on a pane to paste.

And in your ~/.Xresources:

xterm*selectToClipboard: true
xterm*disallowedWindowOps: 20,21,SetXProp

to let Xterm select to the system clipboard as well, and allow Tmux to modify the clipboard (a "window operation").

Then, to apply the changes to your ~/.Xresources, run xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources and restart Xterm and Tmux.

To support macOS and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), we can add

run-shell $HOME/.tmux.conf.sh

to the ~/.tmux.conf, and then create ~/.tmux.conf.sh with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash

bind_copy=(bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane)

# `tmux_bind_copy pbcopy` will make selecting with the mouse (and then
# releasing the selection) in tmux pipe the selection to `pbcopy`
function tmux_bind_copy {
        tmux "${bind_copy[@]}" send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "$@"
}

if [[ "$(uname)" == "Darwin" ]]
then
    # Copy with pbcopy on macOS
    tmux_bind_copy pbcopy
fi

if [[ ! -z "$WSL_DISTRO_NAME" ]]
then
    # copy with Windows' clip.exe on WSL
    tmux_bind_copy /mnt/c/Windows/System32/clip.exe
fi

Note that other “advanced” configuration choices can be made in .tmux.conf.sh, such as setting configuration values based on the current hostname, distribution, and so on; using if-shell is also an option, but is generally pretty clumsy in practice, so using a shell script is an accepted solution.

Also note the weird syntax "${bind_copy[@]}", which inserts the $bind_copy array without performing glob expansion.

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