Practical Vim

Tip 63

Interact with the System Clipboard

Besides Vim’s built-in put commands, we can sometimes use the system paste command. However, using this can occasionally produce unexpected results when running Vim inside a terminal. We can avoid these issues by enabling the ‘paste’ option before using the system paste command.

Preparation

This tip is only applicable when running Vim inside the terminal, so you can safely skip it if you always use GVim. We’ll start by launching Vim in the terminal:

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Enabling the ‘autoindent’ setting is a sure way to induce strange effects when pasting from the system clipboard:

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Finally, we’ll need to copy the following code into the system clipboard. Copying code listings ...