vim – How to Copy Text from One tmux Pane to Another Using Vim

Vim uses the system cut-and-paste mechanism to copy text between instances. When you run vim in a terminal, it doesn't have direct access to any cut-and-paste mechanism. If vim is running in xterm or some other terminal that provides access to X selections and clipboard contents, vim can use that; however your vim binary is compiled without support for that feature.

If both vim instances are running on the same machine, you can use a temporary file to communicate:

:w ~/vim.tmp
:r ~/vim.tmp

If both vim instances are connected to the same X display (in that the DISPLAY environment variable points to the same X display, the vim programs themselves don't need to have any kind of X support), you can use the X selections via an external program such as xsel or xclip. You can omit the p or -selection primary or choose a different selection (-s/secondary or -b/clipboard). Use :w ! (note the space) to copy:

:w !xsel -ip
:w !xclip -i -selection primary

and :r! to paste:

:r !xsel -op
:r !xclip -o -selection primary

This question is a bit old, but I was looking for something similar, and found it here. It creates a second session that shares windows with the first, but has its own view and cursor.

tmux new-session -s alice
tmux new-session -t alice -s bob

If the sharing is happening between two user accounts, you may still have to mess with permissions (which it sounds like you had working already).

Edit: As suggested, a quote from another answer:

First, add a group for tmux users

export TMUX_GROUP=tmux
addgroup $TMUX_GROUP

Create a directory with the group set to $TMUX_GROUP and use the setgid bit so that files created within the directory automatically have the group set to $TMUX_GROUP.

mkdir /var/tmux
chgrp $TMUX_GROUP /var/tmux
chmod g+ws /var/tmux

Next make sure the users that want to share the session are members of $TMUX_GROUP

usermod -aG $TMUX_GROUP user1
usermod -aG $TMUX_GROUP user2