Comment by jhvkjhk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhvkjhk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think the most intuitive way to select and copy is selecting with mouse and click the middle button to paste.

Tmux don’t support this with `set -g mouse on`, but you can add this to your tmux.conf:

``` unbind-key MouseDown2Pane bind-key -n MouseDown2Pane run "tmux set-buffer \"$(xclip -o -sel clipboard)\"; tmux paste-buffer" ```

However, this only works fine within tmux alone. When you select text in tmux, you can’t use middle button to paste them into other programs, the opposite is the same. I don’t know why.

If you set up this binding:

  bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send -X copy-pipe-no-clear 'xclip -i -selection primary'

(or -T copy-mode, if you use emacs-flavored tmux)

Then you can paste your tmux selections into other programs with middle-click -- I think by default tmux only uses the "clipboard" selection, but middle click pastes the "primary" selection.

Wow thank you, this binding works very well! It used to be very annoying to copy-paste between tmux and other softwares, but there won’t be any problems in the future!

Presumably you need some callback attached to tmux set-buffer to make an xclip -i call

But my tmux-fu isn't really up to scratch on how you do that...

Thank you, the author gives a working binding in another reply(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26669079), and the binding uses xclip -i like you said.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com