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I have install Vim 8 (so that I can use ale). Unfortunately I can't seem to get the system clipboard to work. (E.g. using vim-gnome I would use the "+y to yank to the system clipboard. Has anybody got this working?

I installed Vim 8 using:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/vim
sudo apt update
sudo apt install vim
jerome
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  • This version of vim is compiled without clipboard support. You can see that with vim --version | grep clipboard and see it comes up as -clipboard instead of +clipboard. I don't know of any prebuilt vim 8 packages for ubuntu 16 that have clipboard. – Matt Greer Apr 23 '18 at 00:02
  • @MattGreer that's odd. I use the jonathanf/vim PPA on 16.04, and I have +clipboard. OP: What does update-alternatives --display vim report? Is it pointing to vim.gtk3? – muru Apr 23 '18 at 01:42
  • @muru apologies I may have conflated a couple of issues. I'm pretty sure when I posted this I was actually using elementary os. In between then and posting my answer, I switched to 17.10 and encountered a similar problem. That's when I ended up building from source. It's entirely possible that this is not actually an issue on 16.04, but I don't currently have a machine with that installed to check on this further. – jerome Apr 23 '18 at 20:25
  • @muru your comment prompted me to look a little more and you are right. If after adding the jonathanf/vim PPA you apt install vim, it installs vim.basic. If you instead apt install vim-gtk3, then you get vim.gtk3 which has +clipboard – Matt Greer Apr 24 '18 at 02:53
  • @jerome what Matt says^: the vim package's vim.basic has lots of features disabled (on Debian/Ubuntu and on PPAs which build on the existing packaging) - it's just a few steps above the vim.tiny installed by default. You should install one of the GUI Vims or vim-nox for more features (but vim-nox understandably has clipboard support disabled). This is true of all versions of Ubuntu and Debian, though the GUI Vim packages may have different names. – muru Apr 24 '18 at 06:19

2 Answers2

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If after adding the jonathanf/vim PPA you apt install vim, it installs vim.basic. If you instead apt install vim-gtk3, then you get vim.gtk3 which has +clipboard, and thus the system clipboard. Regardless of which one you install, it will get symlinked to /usr/bin/vim

(converted my comment to an answer in case anyone else stumbles into here)

Matt Greer
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    I can confirm that installing vim-gtk3 using jonathanf/vim repo works just fine, and is more straightforward than building from source. Changing the above to the accepted answer. – jerome May 02 '18 at 01:32
  • Perhaps an obvious comment, but it's worth noting this is still a regular terminal Vim and not GVim, even though the 'g' in gtk might mislead you. – icc97 Jun 18 '18 at 00:49
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I was able to get what I needed by building from the source with the following:

$ sudo apt-get remove vim # to remove the binary I had installed
$ sudo apt build-dep vim
$ git clone git@github.com:vim/vim.git
$ cd vim/src
$ ./configure --enable-multibyte \
            --enable-rubyinterp=yes \
            --enable-pythoninterp=yes \
            --with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.7/config \
            --enable-python3interp=yes \
            --with-python3-config-dir=/usr/lib/python3.5/config \
            --enable-perlinterp=yes \
            --enable-luainterp=yes \
            --enable-cscope \
            --prefix=/usr \
            --enable-gui=auto --enable-gtk2-check --with-x # this is what I needed
$ make
$ sudo make install
jerome
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  • If anybody gets stuck with the error on sudo apt build-dep vim You must put source URLs in your sources.list file, this answer would be helpful! – aspiring1 Dec 24 '19 at 06:28
  • Also, using --with-python3-config-dir=$(python3-config --configdir), is better since it gives the config directory searching by itself, even if you are using miniconda/anaconda for python. Also, using sudo checkinstall instead of make should be better as it leads to ease in uninstallation! – aspiring1 Dec 24 '19 at 06:55