Vim Wsl Clipboard
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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
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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
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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.

[code]
  tail -n 1 info.log | clip.exe

│ pipe streams of text into clip.exe

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

[code]
  alias clip=clip.exe

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

yanking to windows clipboard from vim
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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.

[code]
  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
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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.

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