Access X11’s clipboard from tty1-6

clipboardttyvimx11

Sometimes, when I'm running on battery and don't need a window manager, I'll log into tty1, fire up fbterm and Vim and work. Later, if I need the window manager, I'll use the log in GUI but switch between them as required.

The only issue I have with this, is when copying and pasting. If I'm running Vim in a terminal emulator, I can copy from a browser and paste into vim using "*p. When I'm running it in tty0, I can't (for obvious reasons, I guess).

Is there a way I could share between them. For instance, automatically dumping the clipboard contents―when it changes―to a file and then using a macro to insert the contents into the current Vim buffer?

Best Answer

I don't have an X11 machine around so I can't verify this myself, but you might want to look at a program like xclip:

xclip is a command line interface to the X11 clipboard.

That won't exactly let you paste into your current tty, but it should at least print the contents of the clipboard to stdout. Then you can capture that into a file, or pipe it to a command, etc:

DISPLAY=:0 xclip -o | sort

Your DISPLAY environment variable needs to point to your X11 display, which is unlikely to be set by default, so you'll want to set that as above, or like the following if you want it to be around for the duration of your shell session:

export DISPLAY=:0
xclip -o

(This may need tweaking if your display isn't :0 or if you need to deal with Xauthority issues, etc.)

I found this article about it as well which may be helpful: http://www.susegeek.com/utility/xclip-copy-contents-from-command-line-to-x-clipboard-in-opensuse/

Related Solutions

bash shell zsh vi clipboard – How to Paste from Clipboard to vi-Enabled zsh or Bash Shell

Zsh doesn't support anything but internal registers, and bash doesn't support register at all as far as I know. By and large, shells support vi commands, not vim commands.

In zsh, here's a proof-of-concept for accessing the X selection from command mode. For real use you'd want to elaborate on these techniques. I use the xsel program, you can use xclip instead; see How to copy from one vim instance to another using registers. You'll find the features I used in the zle manual.

vi-append-x-selection () { RBUFFER=$(xsel -o -p </dev/null)$RBUFFER; }
zle -N vi-append-x-selection
bindkey -a '^X' vi-append-x-selection
vi-yank-x-selection () { print -rn -- $CUTBUFFER | xsel -i -p; }
zle -N vi-yank-x-selection
bindkey -a '^Y' vi-yank-x-selection

The function vi-append-x-selection inserts the current X selection after the cursor (similar to p or P). The function vi-yank-x-selection copies the last killed or yanked text to the X selection. zle -N declares the functions as zle widgets (i.e. edition commands). bindkey -a sets bindings for vi command mode.

Copying files from command line to clipboard

Yes, basically, you'd need to offer the CLIPBOARD selection either as

text/uri-list with the content being
```
/path/to/file1
/path/to/file2
```
application/x-kde-cutselection or x-special/gnome-copied-files with content copy\nfile://$path1\nfile://$path2\0 or cut\nfile://$path1\nfile://$path2...\0

With xclip you can achieve this with something like

find "$PWD" -name "*.pdf"| xclip -i -selection clipboard -t text/uri-list

I've also found this loliclip command that looked promising, but though I could retrieve the values, I wasn't able to store them and have them retrieved from loliclip by pcmanfm successfully.

You also should be able to implement it in a few lines of perl-tk.

Best Answer

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bash shell zsh vi clipboard – How to Paste from Clipboard to vi-Enabled zsh or Bash Shell

Copying files from command line to clipboard

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