On a pretty stock Slackware 12.0, the "set mouse=r" option is all I need to provide. I ran the following test from an Xterm just to make sure (but I'm using Openbox only, not KDE).

I am using openSuSE, i had klipper (clip board tool) at the tray. When ever i select some text at any window and press copy ---- then it automatically copied and shown at klipper. Now i can see what are copied. Klipper has history manager. My klipper shows last 7 copied texts.

This is an odd and needlessly complex discussion...

Hold shift while hilighting in vim to copy to the clipboard and then middle-click in any other app. When trying to paste *into* vim, just use Shift+Insert assuming you've copied to the system clipboard (the clipboard situation is very messy by default in Linux and is one of the worst designs IMO...to rectify this in WMs that don't handle this stuff as well as klipper or whatever other tool you may use, I always just set my terminal to copy to the primary buffer. urxvt makes this easy with perl extensions). The set mouse=a/r will work as well but you don't have to change that on-the-fly and exclude yourself from VISUAL mode...just hold shift.

Of course the real reason that this thread exists is that you cannot perform proper copying/pasting in vim using *registers* because it wasn't compiled with --with-x (which is annoying). It works properly in gvim but not in console vim, and the only way to fix this (so the clipboard is accessible using the system register in vim) is by recompiling.

Why has this thread reached so many pages?

[edit] Just checked, and shift+middle click works to paste into vim as well. So just hold shift while doing any standard hilighting/middle-clicking in vim and you're golden, and you can still use visual mode. Of course this is still incredibly stupid since it should have been compiled with --with-x in the first place, but I guess they were trying not to exclude those without X on their system. [/edit]

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks T3slider. The Shift modifier works like a charm So I will set mouse to a instead of r from now on. I've no idea why this thread got so loong(Oh, 3 pages). Maybe Shift is broken in the past

What I did on debian Lenny:

1) sudo apt-get install vim-full
2) insert the following into my .vimrc
"""
set clipboard=unnamed
vnoremap y "*y
vnoremap Y "*Y
nnoremap p "*p
nnoremap P "*P
"""

now to copy, I press 'v' to enter visual highlight mode,
highlight the area I want to copy,
and press 'y' to yank it into the clipboard

to paste, I press 'p' from normal/command mode.

----
What this does:
vim uses multiple registers. I'm sure there are some ninjas out there who
switch between registers, but I only use one. the '*' register is the clipboard, so the last 4 commands just specify using that whenever you try to yank or paste.
I dont know if the first line is needed and I don't care.

While you undoubtedly happy using Debian Lenny, this is a Slackware forum. A solution that starts off with the "apt-get" command in a Slackware forum thread won't be very relevant. Not to mention other differences between Slackware and Debian.

Well I'm on Kubuntu I put
set clipboard=unnamed
in .vimrc - and it enables me to interact with clipboard. All copy/paste commands - like dd - all work well through the clipboard.