smartyank.nvim

What is SmartYank • Installation • Configuration • Tmux

The copy-pasta rabbit hole

Have you ever tried to paste something from the clipboard while using neovim and realized this wasn't the text you wanted to paste?

If the answer is yes this plugin might be for you

Take me directly to the juice

Background

When starting to use vim/neovim I found the whole copy-pasta process a bit counter intuitive, coming from systems where there's just one clipboard managed by <Cmd-c>|<Cmd-v> getting used to registers and the way the clipboard option works took some time.

At first I was mad at neovim for polluting my clipboard every time I deleted or changed a text (using d, c or even s) so I used the "blackhole" mappings in order to disable that functionality via:

nnoremap d "_d

But then I realized I actually wanted some of the deleted texts and I was also "missing out" on the "true way of the vimmer" so I decided to use blackhole mappings only with the <leader> key:

nnoremap <leader>d "_d

The above was much better, but this added to my mental overhead of having to think before each delete/change operation if I wanted to use the default operator or my soup'd up leader-prefix version.

In addition I also wanted separation between neovim and the system clipboard so I started using :set clipboard="" which introduced yet another sequence/keybind I needed to press in order to copy the text from the yank register "0 to the clipboard.

Then came copy-pasting over SSH... that required yet an additional keybind/workflow of having to yank the text using OSC52 (using the wonderful ojroques/vim-oscyank).

I needed a better solution with the following requirements:

• No changes to default neovim key mappings
• Minimum clipboard/register pollution: only copy to clipboard when I intent on doing so (i.e. do not overwrite my clipboard on neovim's dd and similar operations)
• Copying over ssh should be seamless, I don't need to care or worry whether I'm local or remote, with or without tmux.
• Easily accessible clipboard history when using neovim

Enter "SmartYank"...

What is SmartYank

SmartYank is an opinionated (yet customizable) yank, it utilizes the TextYankPost event to detect intentional yank operations (by testing vim.v.operator) and:

• Highlight yanked text
• Copy yanked text to system clipboard (regardless of clipboard setting)
• If tmux is available, copy to a tmux clipboard buffer (enables history)
• If ssh session is detected, use OSC52 to copy to the terminal host clipboard

Installation

Using vim-plug

Plug 'ibhagwan/smartyank.nvim'

Using packer.nvim

use { 'ibhagwan/smartyank.nvim' }

Notes:

• Requires neovim > 0.7
• Calling require'smartyank'.setup {} is optional

Configuration

Configuring additional options can be done via the setup function:

require('smartyank').setup {
    ...
}

or if using a .vim file:

lua << EOF
require('smartyank').setup{
  ...
}
EOF

Default Options

Below is a list of all default options:

require('smartyank').setup {
  highlight = {
    enabled = true,         -- highlight yanked text
    higroup = "IncSearch",  -- highlight group of yanked text
    timeout = 2000,         -- timeout for clearing the highlight
  },
  clipboard = {
    enabled = true
  },
  tmux = {
    enabled = true,
    -- remove `-w` to disable copy to host client's clipboard
    cmd = { 'tmux', 'set-buffer', '-w' }
  },
  osc52 = {
    enabled = true,
    -- escseq = 'tmux',     -- use tmux escape sequence, only enable if
                            -- you're using tmux and have issues (see #4)
    ssh_only = true,        -- false to OSC52 yank also in local sessions
    silent = false,         -- true to disable the "n chars copied" echo
    echo_hl = "Directory",  -- highlight group of the OSC52 echo message
  },
  -- By default copy is only triggered by "intentional yanks" where the
  -- user initiated a `y` motion (e.g. `yy`, `yiw`, etc). Set to `false`
  -- if you wish to copy indiscriminately:
  -- validate_yank = false,
  -- 
  -- For advanced customization set to a lua function returning a boolean
  -- for example, the default condition is:
  -- validate_yank = function() return vim.v.operator == "y" end,
}

Tmux

One (of the many) advantages of using tmux is the ability to view the yank history by using <prefix># (by default <C-a>#).

Using fzf-lua tmux_buffers we can fuzzy find the tmux paste buffers and by pressing <CR> copy the current selection into the "unnamed" register for easy pasting with p or P (similar functionality to what is achieved using nvim-neoclip.lua):