Vim "yank" does not seem to work

vim yank
Adam Rubin picture Adam Rubin · Jul 10, 2013 · Viewed 16.8k times · Source

I'm fairly new to Vim. Tonight, I learned about the "yank" command, but when I try to use it in MacVim, it doesn't do anything. Neither Y nor y{motion} do anything. I tried with a default .vimrc to rule out any weird config issues.

Google-fu is failing me. This feels like a noobie issue. Am I missing something obvious?

Answer

Weston Ganger picture Weston Ganger · Sep 4, 2016

If you have the setting set clipboard=unnamedplus in your .vimrc then this will not be working.

For OSX you have to use set clipboard=unnamed

For Linux you will probably need to use set clipboard=unnamedplus

Heres the snippet from my personal .vimrc

if system('uname -s') == "Darwin\n"
  set clipboard=unnamed "OSX
else
  set clipboard=unnamedplus "Linux
endif

Related questions

How to select between brackets (or quotes or ...) in Vim?

I'm sure there used to be a plugin for this kinda stuff, but now that I need it, I can't seem to find it (naturally), so I'll just ask nice and simple. What is the easiest way to select between …

Read More
Vim yanking range of lines

I'm a C# developer who has just recently decided to expand my knowledge of the tools available to me. The first tool I've decided to learn is Vi/Vim. Everything has been going well so far, but there are a …

Read More
Yank file name / path of current buffer in Vim

Assuming the current buffer is a file open for edit, so :e does not display E32: No file name. I would like to yank one or all of: The file name exactly as show on the status line, e.g. ~\…

Read More