VIM won't let me copy a portion of text (in XFCE Term). COPY is grey'd out. You can only select ALL text and copy. It wasn't like this before.

What setting needs to be changed to allow the WM to manage copies?

You will need to change the vim's clipboard setting by:

Either enter that in a vim session (command) or put it in your .vimrc.

However be aware that Slackware's default VIM package does not have such functionality. You will need to recompile VIM with the --with-x switch at the configure command before building.

You can check if your VIM has X11 clipboard functionality by checking:

If the command shows "+X11" then you have it (the x11 clipboard), if it appears -X11 then you will need to recompile as I said earlier.

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I'm not what options would be needed for the context menu, but adding ":set clipboard=unnamedplus" to ~/.vimrc and calling vim with "gvim -v" (setting an alias is handy) has always worked for me. Copy in VISUAL mode with yy, and paste in INSERT mode with Ctrl+Shift+V.

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Oh yeah! VIM... it's crunchy!

If you want to paste from the X11 "PRIMARY selection" using the middle mouse button in the usual manner you will need to add set mouse="" into your vimrc.

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Heres a description how to recompile vim --with-x using the slackbuild script.

mkdir -p ~/tmp/vimbuild
cd ~/tmp/vimbuild

# list the version of the dependency file ctags at slackware.com
# current output is: ctags-5.8.tar.xz

# download the ctags file
# download vim.SlackBuild
# modify vim.SlackBuild for x functionality

chmod 755 vim.SlackBuild

su root

# build the vim package
./vim.SlackBuild

# remove vim if it is already installed
removepkg vim

#install the modified vim
installpkg /tmp/vim-*.txz

As user you can put these options in your .vimrc file

" turn on Ctrl+c,v keys to copy,paste
vnoremap <C-c> "+y
map <C-v> "+P

" copy to both the clipboard and primary
vnoremap <C-c> y :let @+=@"<CR>

Hmm, i usually mark the text in a window with the mouse pointer.
to copy the text to vim i press I as insert and then press shift + insert and it paste from the X11 buffer.

Copying from the actual terminal (urxvt/rxvt-unicode where vim is running) i press shift+mouse1 to mark the text with the mouse pointer
and it's copy able to other terminals

Hmm, hope this helps..

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This is the correct answer. There is no need to recompile vim. Simply use the one Pat ships with X11 support already built in.

See also this previous thread:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...7/#post5765865

Another option is to make nvi the default symlink to vi instead of vim. It's great that Patrick made that an installation choice for the upcoming 15 release.

Vim has a lot of great features, but needs to have sane defaults that don't break the basic expected UI functionality.

here native vim w/ -X11 shipped in Slackware 15 RC2 has no issue copying and pasting when started from an xfce4-terminal.
deliberately choosing to reset the mouse macro to remove the all mode in the .vimrc : the center mouse button is used for the copy paste.
you may be talking of gvim instead ?

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