Vim Wsl Clipboard

I’ve long used neovim from within windows wsl, and for far too long, I went without a proper way to get text out of it and into windows.

wsl has access to cmd applications ¶ #

wsl can access clip.exe. You can do some cool things with it, such as cat a file into the clipboard, sending output from a command to the clipboard, or set an autocmd group in vim to send yank to the windows clipboard.

using clip.exe ¶ #

Let’s say you want to send a teammate the tail of a log file over chat. You can tail the file into clip.exe.

tail -n 1 info.log | clip.exe

pipe streams of text into clip.exe

make it a bit more natural ¶ #

I recently made mine feel a bit more natural by aliasing it to clip.

alias clip=clip.exe

pop this in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

yanking to windows clipboard from vim ¶ #

I use neovim as my daily text editor and its a pain to share code with a teammate over chat, stack overflow, into a gist, or whatever you need. The following snippet has been quite useful and flawless for me.

if system('uname -r') =~ "Microsoft"
    augroup Yank
        autocmd!
        autocmd TextYankPost * :call system('/mnt/c/windows/system32/clip.exe ',@")
        augroup END
endif

add this to your ~/.vimrc or your ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

Wsl2 ¶ #

Based on some feedback from l-sannin the ‘uname -r’ command now returns uname -r command returns '5.10.16.3-microsoft-standard-WSL2' So you will need an all lowercase microsoft.

if system('uname -r') =~ "microsoft"
  augroup Yank
  autocmd!
  autocmd TextYankPost * :call system('/mnt/c/windows/system32/clip.exe ',@")
  augroup END
endif