Vim copy-paste

From askubuntu web

One of the users gave us a nice detailed description of the typical options. Note that the author was focused mostly on Ubuntu, so few recommendations are related with that, but the vim properties remain the same.

1. If you want to copy paste contents within the same file, use yank and paste.

2. If you want to copy paste contents across terminals, open the first file, yanking the text you want, then open your second file within vim (e.g. :tabnew /path/to/second/file) and press p to paste it.

3. If you want to copy paste contents from vim to an external program, you need to access the system clipboard. The GUI version of vim always has clipboard support, however, if you like to use Vim from a terminal, you will have to check for X11-clipboard support.

   From the console, type:

    $ vim --version | grep xterm
   

   If you find -xterm_clipboard, you have two options:

   a. Compile vim yourself, with the xterm_clipboard flag on

   b. Uninstall vim, install gvim (vim-gtk or vim-gnome) instead. You can stick to non-gui vim by calling vim from the terminal, the same way you did before. This time when you check you should find +xterm_clipborad.

   Now, when you yank some text in the + register inside your vim editor (e.g. “+yy), it also gets copied to the system clipboard which you can retrieve from your external program like gedit editor, by using Ctrl+V.

4. If you want to copy paste contents from an external program into vim, first copy your text into system clipboard via Ctrl+C, then in vim editor insert mode, click the mouse middle button (usually the wheel) or press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste.

   These are 4 basic copy & paste conditions related to vim.