Copy paste in tmux session inside ssh

When you access your tmux session on a remote machine from different client machines, based on the client machine configuration and terminal, etc., some features will not work. One of them is copy-paste.

I used to have tmux-yank configured to xclip. But it didn’t work will when I accessed my remote VM from a Windows machine running putty. Similarly I had to configure every new machine I start using which was time consuming. Majority of my copy-paste activities will be between tmux panes and windows. I don’t usually copy from the local machine to the remote machine. So I used this simple hack.

Configured my .tmux.conf to redirect yank-ed to a temporary file as below.

bind -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel 'cat > /tmp/clipboard'

Configured .zshrc to load an environment variable from that temporary file on every prompt.

precmd() { export p=`cat /tmp/clipboard` }

So if I copy any text in tmux using y, it will be populated into a environmental variable named p.

NOTE: As the environmental variable will be loaded upon next prompt only, after copying, you need to press enter once it to take effect

Below gif will show how it works