Clipboard sync between WSL Neovim and Windows
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I recently started migration from Vim to Neovim. One of the first issues was proper configuration of clipboard. By proper, I mean a situation where I have a working 2-way-sync clipboard between Neovim running in tmux in WSL in Windows Terminal and Windows, so I can easily copy and paste from my browser or any other program to and from Neovim.
With Vim I intially achieved that with GWSL
and configured $DISPLAY env variable
which was a quite complex and unstable solution
(GWSL sometimes has weird issues).
Thankfully, it was needed only on older versions of Windows 10
(my $CURRENT_COMPANY still uses the old Win10 version though…).
Up-to-date Windows 10 and Windows 11
support clipboard sync for Vim out of the box.
They have something like GWSL built-in,
and surprisingly it’s quite stable and just works.
Bravo Microsoft 😛
The only caveat is to install Vim version which has clipboard support – usually vim-gtk is recommended on Debian/Ubuntu.
The unexpected
I was a bit surprised to find out that this doesn’t work with Neovim.
Some googling brought the solution: win32yank.
This is a small Rust program
which integrates with Windows cliboard,
providing an interface which can be easily used by Neovim.
Actually, Neovim has built-in support for it.
You just need to make sure that win32yank.exe is on your $PATH.
How to get win32yank.exe?
I use WSL to do most of my text editting, but I still find it useful to have the same editor on Windows itself.
You can install it most easily with
winget,
i.e. winget install Neovim.Neovim.
Why this it important?
It turns out that Neovim on Windows is shipped with win32yank!
Creating symlink
winget installs Neovim in Program Files,
and win32yank.exe is located in the bin subfolder.
Use this command to create a symlink in your home folder,
so Neovim can see it.
ln --symbolic /mnt/c/Program\ Files/Neovim/bin/win32yank.exe ~/.local/bin/win32yank.exe
Of course, ~/.local/bin has to exist
and be in your $PATH for this to work.