Copy to clipboard from tmux on a remote ssh session

Note: A better approach is documented in this blog post by Igor Babuschkin.

Updated in October 2024, to work with Wayland and native OSC-52 support

My current working setup is tmux + neovim. On top of that, I use my desktop for development that I often access remotely outside of home.

One of the drawbacks of working remotely via SSH was that I couldn’t copy to my client’s native clipboard (eg: to share code snippets in Slack) remotely.

OSC-52 has been around for a while and has been adopted gradually which is what I used to get a working copy paste working on my remote tmux session. Note that all layers of communication from the terminal to the editor need to support OSC-52 and have the feature enabled.

My current setup, therefore, relies on these:

• Kitty
• tmux
• Neovim

Kitty #

Supports OSC-52 out of the box as far as I know.

tmux #

tmux needs the following config variables to enable OSC-52 support:

set -s set-clipboard on
set -g allow-passthrough

Neovim #

I added the following lines to my neovim config to copy to my system clipboard (also works on remote ssh sessions):

local function paste()
  return {
    vim.fn.split(vim.fn.getreg(""), "\n"),
    vim.fn.getregtype(""),
  }
end

vim.g.clipboard = {
  name = "OSC 52",
  copy = {
    ["+"] = require("vim.ui.clipboard.osc52").copy("+"),
    ["*"] = require("vim.ui.clipboard.osc52").copy("*"),
  },
  paste = {
    ["+"] = paste,
    ["*"] = paste,
  },
}

vim.opt.clipboard:append { 'unnamed', 'unnamedplus' }