yank to clipboard using xsel doesn't work

[hensz]

Hi!
I run tmux with tmux-yank via x-forwarding on Windows, don't know if this is related. At least using xsel works fine: echo "foo" | xsel -b results in having "foo" in the system clipboard, accessible both from Linux and Windows.

However when copying from tmux by either using the mouse (with mouse-mode on) or by using the copy mode, the selection is always put in the PRIMARY clipboard, where I can paste it by using + ].

I tried using @override_copy_command or custom_copy_command, setting both to xsel -b, but with no effect. Also I set yank_selection_mouse to clipboard, which also has no effect. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,
Torsten

[wizonesolutions]

@hensz Have you found a workaround for this? I can work around it by pressing y while holding the mouse button down, but it's annoying to hold the mouse button down. But disabling auto-yank on mouseup doesn't work either...it ignores the setting.

[hensz]

Hi!
The workaround I currently use is holding SHIFT while selection - this disables tmux copy mode and uses the regular Linux copy mode. I can live with this, however I still want to know why the way I want to use doesn't work. Is this a bug, or am I doing somethign wrong here?

[ebkalderon]

Another user chiming in. It doesn't seem to work with xclip either. I can confirm that the workaround by @hensz works on my machine too, but at that point, there is no reason to use tmux-yank. For context, I'm running a very recent Arch Linux with tmux version 2.9a.

[CollinChaffin]

Same here. Running PhotonOS v3 which doesn't support xclip, xsel, or pbcopy so was hoping the ESC sequences (which I thought was the original magic behind this) would be my one option. Alas, this plugin still does not transfer anything to the clipboard.

[hensz]

Hi there!
Does no one have any clue what causes the issue? Since tmux-yank explicitly supports pasting to the system clipboard it should be possible to get it to work - but how, with which settings?
Any help is appreciated. If you need further information e.g. logs or whatever, I'm happy to provide this.
Thanks,
Torsten

[hensz]

So while I can live with the workaround, using Shift+select, I still like to use the built-in copy&paste functionality of tmux to copy into the clipboard. Since this is not working with tmux-yank, is someone aware of an alternative way to do this, e.g. with a different plugin?

[hensz]

Is someone reading this? As three user already mentioned, tmux-yank seems to be useless of this is a general issue. Or does anyone see this different?

[urey-hiker]

Is someone reading this? As three user already mentioned, tmux-yank seems to be useless of this is a general issue. Or does anyone see this different?

maybe we should use the origin tmux way to do the samething.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/131187

[hensz]

There are several suggestions in this thread. I tried a few, but none worked for me. Since I'm not really familiar with Linux clipboard, I don't understand much from these threads and can only copy&paste without understanding what actually is going on here.

Nevertheless, there's this extension, tmux-yank, which should solve exactly this problem, yanking to clipboard, but in fact it doesn't.

[urey-hiker]

There are several suggestions in this thread. I tried a few, but none worked for me. Since I'm not really familiar with Linux clipboard, I don't understand much from these threads and can only copy&paste without understanding what actually is going on here.

Nevertheless, there's this extension, tmux-yank, which should solve exactly this problem, yanking to clipboard, but in fact it doesn't.

My tmux work fine with xsel with this configure in tmux.conf:
bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel 'xsel -i -b'
My tmux version is 3.1 and this configure should work in tmux version > 2.5
It works the way exactly as tmux-yank, so also check you disable the old run tmux-yank configure.
I put my tmux.conf here, you may compare it with yours.

[hensz]

Nope, doesn't work. Since I suspected xsel to behave strange I tested this:
echo foo | xsel -ib

This does nothing, the clipboard content (which I then paste with Ctrl+Insert) is still unchanged.

However, when I run xsel with -ip (primary instead of clipboard) pasting with both Ctrl+Insert and middle mouse click pasted "foo\n" -- sadly with a trailing newline, but better than nothing.

So I modified you config entry from xsel -i -b to xsel -ip, just as on the command line. But no luck, pasting doesn't work.

Is there a way to diagnose why this doesn't work? Since currently I don't see where things go wrong. Is it the hook for copy-mode-vi, is it send-keys, is it the copy-pipe-and-cancel event or the xsel command?

[hensz]

I also now tried tmux 3, but the result is nearly identical. The only difference is: With tmux 3 the command xsel -ib works as expected - but only when run from command line, but not together with tmux-yank.

Has anyone ever managed to get copying to the clipboard to work? If yes, how?

[hensz]

Still no update... :-(

[mraxilus]

I take it that this project is abandoned? It would've been really useful...

[hensz]

Since we don't use x-forwarding anymore (for reasons), xsel and xclip doesn't work at all. Thus, this issue is not relevant for me anymore, so from my perspective the issue can be closed.