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Copy to clipboard from tmux on a remote ssh session

·1 min

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

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.

It took me some time to figure out how to do it, and it’s quite straightforward.

There are three steps:

  • Run ssh with either the -X (trusted X11 forwarding, preferred) or -Y (untrusted X11 forwarding) switch.
  • Before attaching tmux, get the value of DISPLAY env var (echo $DISPLAY). Make a note of it.
  • After attaching the tmux session, export DISPLAY to this value.

And that’s it. The -X switch is intuitive. However, it’s setting the DISPLAY environment variable that’s the key. My tmux sessions usually originated on my desktop, where the value for DISPLAY would be :0. When I am on an ssh session, this value is :10.0. Without setting this environment variable, the xsel command will point to the wrong display.