Kyle Manna

Kyle Manna

Entrepreneur and chip whisperer.

FSSH part 2: Tmux and Vim

2 minute read

FSSH Introduction

The other day I introduced fssh, and initially the standalone command line tools worked great. However, it came up short for tmux and vim.

This blog article is going to explain about how to leverage fssh + ui_copy and ui_paste for copying and pasting vim visual buffers and tmux buffers.

For example, this enables users to copy some code (or something) on a web page (ie Mac OS X or Linux + Chrome) and then paste it directly in to vim, unmolested. Another example would be to copy several hundred lines of shell output (running in tmux) in to a Github Gist, by copying/pasting without having to worry about other adjacent tmux panes or other details.

My Public dot-files

I started a public Github repo for my dot-files, in this repo are a few files that provide the functionality I’m going to talk about in the following sections:

  • shell_env.sh - Functions to aid in cross shell invocation environment caching.
  • vimrc - Adds key bindings for ui_copy and ui_paste from fssh.
  • tmux.conf - Adds key bindings for ui_copy and ui_paste from fssh.

Vim Usage

Assuming fssh is setup according to my earlier blog post then copying the key bindings to your .vimrc.

To use the vim bindings for copying:

  1. Start vim and open a file.
  2. Enter visual mode (type v or shift-v from normal mode).
  3. Highlight some text.
  4. Type C-c (CTRL+c), and ui_copy will be invoked.
  5. Paste the buffer in your host UI (i.e. Command+v on OS X)

To use the vim vindings for pasting:

  1. Copy text in the host UI (i.e Command+c on OS X)
  2. Open a file with vim
  3. Type C-v (CTRL+v), and ui_paste will be invoked.

Simple as that.

Tmux Usage

Tmux usage is very similar to the vim usage.

Copy:

  1. Enter copy-mode by typing tmux-prefix + { (Tmux prefix is C-b by default, most people change it to C-a).
  2. Highlight some text.
  3. When highlighted text is selected, press enter to copy it to tmux’s buffer.
  4. To feed tmux’s buffer to ui_copy, type tmux-prefix + C-c.
  5. Paste the buffer in your host UI (i.e. Command+v on OS X)

Paste:

  1. Copy text in the host UI (i.e Command+c on OS X)
  2. Paste the buffer by typing tmux-prefix + C-v.

That’s it.

Other Handy Utilties

The bash_env.sh file has some other handy utilties like “tmux up” and “env-import” which are very handy. Maybe I’ll write about them another day. In the meantime, people may find them useful.

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