Getting tmux to copy a buffer to the clipboard

Question

I am trying to figure out a decent way to copy what I have in a tmux buffer into my clipboard. I have tried a couple of different things like

bind-key p select-pane -t 2 \; split-window 'xsel -i -b' \; paste-buffer

which gets me fairly close, all I have to do is hit control-d after I do prefix-p.

I tried fixing that by doing

bind-key p select-pane -t 2 \; split-window 'xsel -i -b << HERE\; tmux paste-buffer\; echo HERE'

But that just doesn't work. In fact if I pair this down to just

bind-key p select-pane -t 2 \; split-window 'xsel -i -b << HERE'

it doesn't do anything so I am assuming that split-window doesn't like << in a shell command.

Any ideas?

Edit: You can skip the select-pane -t 2 if you want, it inst really important. I just use a specific layout and pane 2 is the one i prefer to split when I doing something else so that goes into my bindings involving splits by default.

Answer 1

Here documents need newlines. For example, in a shell script, you can write

cat <<EOF >somefile; echo  done
file contents
EOF

I don't think tmux lets you put newlines there, and even if it did, this wouldn't be a good approach. What if the data itself contains HERE alone on a line (e.g. because you're copying your .tmux.conf)?

I suggest to write the buffer contents to a temporary file. Untested:

bind-key p save-buffer ~/.tmux-buffer \; run-shell "xsel -i -b <~/.tmux-buffer && rm ~/.tmux-buffer"

There's a race condition if you use this command in two separate tmux instances. I don't know how to solve this.

Answer 2

A slightly modified variant of the accepted answer, which I cooked up.

I also prefer to use the system clipboard (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V) in addition to xclip's primary default clipboard (the one you get with mouse selection and mouse middle-clicks). For choosing the system clipboard you need to pass -selection clipboard argument to xclip.

Also while copying a buffer into a clipboard, I like the ability to choose which buffer I want to copy. It is done using choose-buffer and then passing buffer the argument to save-buffer using -b %%.

# Copy into clipboard
bind C-c choose-buffer "run \"tmux save-buffer -b %% - | xclip -i -selection clipboard\""
# Paste from clipboard
bind C-v run "xclip -o -selection clipboard | tmux load-buffer - ; tmux paste-buffer"
# Copy into primary
bind C-y choose-buffer "run \"tmux save-buffer -b %% - | xclip -i \""
# Paste from primary
bind C-p run "xclip -o | tmux load-buffer - ; tmux paste-buffer"

UPDATE: Somehow with tmux 1.8 and two of my openSUSE 12.2 installations, I see a hang when tmux run-shell is invoked with xclip reading from stdin over a pipe. I instead decided to give xsel a try and that seems to work. These are the equivalent key bindings using xsel. I also used && to chain the commands in paste for more robustness.

# Copy into clipboard
bind C-c choose-buffer "run \"tmux save-buffer -b '%%' - | xsel -i -b\""
# Paste from clipboard
bind C-v run "xsel -o -b | tmux load-buffer - && tmux paste-buffer"
# Copy into primary
bind C-y choose-buffer "run \"tmux save-buffer -b '%%' - | xsel -i\""
# Paste from primary
bind C-p run "xsel -o | tmux load-buffer - && tmux paste-buffer"

Answer 3

The copy-pipe command was added as of version 1.8. It copies a selection to the tmux buffer and pipes it to a command. Now there is no need for a prefix binding. Here's an example:

bind -t vi-copy y copy-pipe "xclip"

# For OS X users:
bind -t vi-copy y copy-pipe "reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy"

Now when you have some text selected in copy-mode, y will copy that text to the tmux buffer as well as the OS clipboard. However, it doesn't help if you want to get text from the clipboard to the tmux buffer.

Answer 4

I am trying to figure out a decent way to copy what I have in a tmux buffer into my clipboard. I have tried a couple of different things like

For emacs style bindings there are a few different options. (Vi-style should be similar?) The typical binding for doing "copy-selection" in emacs is M-w, so it would be very convenient to have the same binding in tmux.

1 -- Would be ideal, but is non-working (due to tmux limitation?)

unbind-key -t emacs-copy M-w
bind-key -t emacs-copy M-w copy-selection\; \
  run-shell "tmux save-buffer - | xsel --input --clipboard"

2 -- Compromise that works well for me: Accept using a different keybinding for emacs-copy in tmux. Use for example C-M-w. (This binding which will be defined "globally" -- not only in copy-mode -- but only useful in copy-mode)

bind-key -n C-M-w send-keys M-w\; \
 run-shell "tmux save-buffer - | xsel --input --clipboard" 

Answer 5

This should work:

# move x clipboard into tmux paste buffer
bind C-p run "tmux set-buffer \"$(xclip -o)\"; tmux paste-buffer"
# move tmux copy buffer into x clipboard
bind C-y run "tmux save-buffer - | xclip -i"

Answer 6

I dislike having extra key presses, so I wanted something more ambitious. Enter copy mode with [, highlight the right text, and then press ] to copy the text to the clipboard.

Also, tmux likes to include newlines in expressions that wrap (and oddly those newlines are in the wrong place! They aren't where the expression wrapped on the screen). So I wanted C-] to copy the expression removing the newlines.

On tmux 1.6 I tried this:

bind [ copy-mode
bind -t vi-copy ] run "tmux send-keys Enter; tmux show-buffer | xclip -i -selection clipboard;"
bind -t vi-copy C-] run "tmux send-keys Enter; tmux show-buffer | perl -pe 's/\n//' | xclip -i -selection clipboard;"

but that didn't work because tmux doesn't seem happy to bind complex things to the vi-copy table. So I ended up doing this instead:

bind [ copy-mode \;                                                        \
    bind -n ] run                                                          \
    "tmux send-keys Enter;                                                 \
     tmux show-buffer | xclip -i -selection clipboard;                     \
     tmux unbind -n C-];                                                   \
     tmux unbind -n ]" \;                                                  \
    bind -n C-] run                                                        \
    "tmux send-keys Enter;                                                 \
     tmux show-buffer | perl -pe 's/\n//' | xclip -i -selection clipboard; \
     tmux unbind -n C-];                                                   \
     tmux unbind -n ]"

This leads to weird things (] or C-] will act funny the next time you use them, but only once) if you exit from copy mode in another way besides ] or C-]. This could be fixed with some more bindings I imagine, but this does what I want most of the time.

Answer 7

After trying different solution, here is my final setup:

# move x clipboard into tmux paste buffer
bind C-p run "xclip -o | tmux load-buffer -
# move tmux copy buffer into x clipboard
bind C-y run "tmux save-buffer - | xclip -i -selection clipboard"

using save-buffer instead of show-buffer gives the real data without the data as shown with line-breaks when you are in splits.

I also use this to begin selection/copy in tmux copy-mode:

bind-key -t vi-copy 'v' begin-selection
bind-key -t vi-copy 'y' copy-selection

I guess it could be possible to merge the copy-selection with the 'y' key AND move it to the x clipboard.

Answer 8

A simpler solution for Mac OS-X

This builds off of Alex's answer and uses stuff that didn't exist at the time.

If you are using homebrew (and if you aren't, why aren't you?) then you can just do this:

brew install reattach-to-user-namespace

Then in your ~/.tmux.conf:

set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh" # or bash...
bind C-c run "tmux save-buffer - | reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy"
bind C-v run "reattach-to-user-namespace pbpaste | tmux load-buffer - && tmux paste-buffer"

To copy the buffer from tmux (you should have already copied something using tmux) into the Mac pasteboard, use <tmux-key> Control-c. It will now be available for Command-v or pbpaste

To paste something from the Mac pasteboard, use <tmux-key> Control-v.

Answer 9

A solution for Mac OS X. Follow these 2 steps:

1. Use Chris Johnsen's workaround: https://github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard

2. Add this code to your tmux config (~/.tmux.conf)

# paste clipboard into tmux buffer
bind v run-shell "reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh -c 'tmux set-buffer \\"$(pbpaste)\\"; tmux paste-buffer'"
# put tmux buffer into x clipboard
bind y run-shell "reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh -c 'tmux show-buffer | pbcopy'"

Answer 10

There is a solution on the Arch Wiki using xclip:

# move tmux copy buffer into x clipboard
bind-key C-y save-buffer /tmp/tmux-buffer \; run-shell "cat /tmp/tmux-buffer | xclip"

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tmux