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Oscillator

Introduction

Oscillator is a neovim / vim plugin to allow full access to the system clipboard in any environment. No additional requirements are needed, just set up your terminal emulator once to allow OSC52 ANSI terminal sequences and your done. This also works when running vim on a remote machine through ssh or in a virtual environment, e.g. docker. The clipboard contents is sent through stdin / stdout, just the same way as the normal communication between vim and the terminal emulator. While there are other solutions for yanking contents from vim to the system clipboard (see related work) they are lacking the other direction to paste the clipboard to vim. For any limitations in the current version of oscillator, see section caveats below.

Installation

Copy the plugin folder (or git-clone it directly) to an appropriate place in your vim directory so that the built-in vim plugin manager can find it. For example:

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start
$ cd ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start
$ git clone https://github.com/captaingroove/oscillator.git

Configuration

Neovim can be configured to handle clipboard access transparently using the + and * registers by adding this to your neovim config file:

let g:clipboard = {
  \ 'name': 'oscillator',
  \ 'copy': {
  \     '+': {lines, regtype -> OscillatorWriteRegToClipboard(lines, regtype, 'clipboard')},
  \     '*': {lines, regtype -> OscillatorWriteRegToClipboard(lines, regtype, 'primary')},
  \     },
  \ 'paste': {
  \     '+': {-> OscillatorReadRegFromClipboard('clipboard')},
  \     '*': {-> OscillatorReadRegFromClipboard('primary')},
  \     },
  \ }

For vim you might simply add two key mappings for yanking and pasting:

vnoremap <leader>y :OscillatorYank<CR>
nnoremap <leader>p :OscillatorPaste<CR>

That's it.

However, you might want to change any of these optional settings:

let g:oscillator_silent = v:true
" v:false - surpress messages (default)
" v:true  - be more verbose

let g:oscillator_yank_limit = 1000000
" Limit the size of text in bytes that can be yanked to the clipboard.
" Default is 0 which means no limit.

let g:oscillator_base64decoder = 'base64 -d'
" Use this shell command to decode the clipboard text to base64. Default is a
" vimscript implementation of the base64 algorithm. This applies only to vim.
" For neovim a lua implementation is used.
" Default is '' which means use the plugin internal decoder.

let g:oscillator_base64encoder = 'base64'
" Use this shell command to encode the clipboard text to base64. Default is a
" vimscript implementation of the base64 algorithm. This applies only to vim.
" For neovim a lua implementation is used.
" Default is '' which means use the plugin internal encoder.

let g:oscillator_osc52_default_selection = 'clipboard'
" Type of clipboard that is used by the OscillatorYank and OscillatorPaste
" ex-commands. If set to a different value, the 'primary' selection is used.
" 'clipboard' and 'primary' are clipboard types defined by the OSC52
" documentation, see also https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html.
" Default is 'clipboard' which corresponds to the cut&paste clipboard on
" most platforms.

Compatibility

The plugin has been tested on Linux with the following vim versions:

  • vim 8.2
  • neovim v0.7.1-dev+33-g35075dcc2-dirty with nvim.patch from this repo

It has been tested with the following terminal emulators:

  • kitty 0.24.4. Add this to kitty.conf to allow OSC52 terminal sequences with unlimited clipboard text size (see kitty documentation for details):

      clipboard_control write-clipboard write-primary read-clipboard read-primary
  clipboard_max_size 0

  • alacritty 0.11.0-dev. Only yanking to the clipboard is supported by the terminal emulator.

  • wezterm 20211205-192649-672c1cc1. Only yanking to the clipboard is supported by the terminal emulator.

Caveats

  • The plugin works with vim out of the box, however a small patch is currently required for neovim. The patch is supplied in this repo (vim.patch). You can apply it to the neovim source code with the following command from the root of the neovim git repo:

    $ git apply vim.patch

    The upside of this is that the plugin is much faster with neovim than with vim by using lua instead of vimscript. The plugin provides implementations for the same functionality in both, lua and vimscript. However, neovim doesn't work with the vimscript version due to its async event loop.

  • When using a terminal multiplexer like tmux or any other program that scans and modifies stdin / stdout the OSC52 sequences might be filtered out and oscillator might not work. There may be work arounds for this but currently oscillator assumes talking to a terminal emulator with standard OSC52 sequences.

Related work

  • Yanking to the clipboard using OSC52 terminal sequences: OSCYank
  • Base64 encoding / decoding in vimscript: Vital