I am trying to copy a selection of text from vim to another windows application...say firefox or notepad for example. However I cant seem to do this with the 'y' command. I have windows hotkeys enabled so by pressing ctrl-c i can achieve this but was hoping to get rid entirely of these windows commands in vim.
Is this possible? also what about vice versa copying from windows and pasting into vim
thanks in advance
I don't see any harm in using Windows command keys in GVim. Alternatively, you can also use the hotkey "+y for yanking (copying) and "+p for pasting to and from the system clipboard. This works on most platforms (Vim instances that are not directly attached to an X server on unix are a bit more difficult).
Don't use windows bindings as you then won't be able to be as good in Vim on other platforms.
Use "*y - copy to system clipboard. It works well on Mac Os, Windows, Linux.
as per above answers:
"*y
"*p
Using ctrl-v will make entering control characters tough in insert mode, and ctrl-v is visual-block in normal mode, although so is ctrl-q.
Personally have found the following quite natural & little finger friendly
vmap <a-c> "*y
imap <a-p> "*p
If you want to copy from a window (or from vim), try :
:set paste
But be careful other options may be modified. Everything is detailed in :
:help paste
Hope it helps.
I have
set clipboard=unnamed
in my ~/.vimrc. Then "yy", "D", etc, yank directly to the Windows clipboard. It also works in MacVim. For Linux gvim, you have to remember to prefix these operations with "+