Comment by cestith

1 day ago

Vim itself can select a column.

but it's non-trivial to copy that selection to the outside of vim to another app.

i can select a column in tmux too, using tmux commands, and then it's the same problem. i can't use that selection outside of tmux.

i simply want the GUI to be aware that there are multiple columns in the terminal and let me select text within one using the mouse and then copy that to a different window/app.

  • > it's non-trivial to copy that selection to the outside of vim to another app

    A correctly compiled Vim will make the two X clipboards (“selections”) available as registers * (“primary”, i.e. the current selection, pasteable with the middle mouse button) and + (“secondary”, accessed with Ctrl-X/C/V) for both reading and writing. (I believe these are synonyms in graphical environments that don’t have two clipboards.) You can make one of them the default by adding

      set clipboard=unnamed
    

    resp.

      set clipboard=unnamedplus
    

    to your Vim configuration.

    > i can select a column in tmux too, using tmux commands, and [...] i can't use that selection outside of tmux.

    If you’re using Wayland on Linux, install wl-clipboard and put

      set-option -s copy-command wl-copy
    

    in your tmux configuration, and mutatis mutandis for other (local) graphical environments. Watch out for cases where you’ve trained yourself to assume that the tmux selection and the desktop’s clipboard aren’t the same thing. (I don’t know how I’d synchronize things in the other direction, that seems non-trivial.)