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.

Date: April 17, 2021

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.

``` bash
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.

``` bash
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.

``` vim
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](https://github.com/WaylonWalker/waylonwalker.com/issues/4)
from [l-sannin](https://github.com/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.

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