+ OSC-52 +

I use ssh a lot. Copying text from the remote machine to +the host machine always sucked. But OSC-52 makes that easy.

OSC-52 is an ANSI escape sequence to write text to the terminal +emulator. The terminal emulator, if it understands what is going on, +will in turn write this text to the system clipboard.

What this means is some printf magic can send text to +your clipboard. I store this one-liner in a script called +oclip:

printf "\033]52;c;%s\007" "$(base64 <&0)"

and I run it with:

remote $ cat some_file.txt | oclip
+
+# some_file.txt's contents are now the host's clipboard

The catch

Your terminal emulator must support OSC-52, alacritty +and termux seem to support this out of the box. In +st, OSC-52 works with this change to +config.h:

int allowwindowops = 1;

If you are using tmux, you need to flip this switch +on:

set -s set-clipboard on

If you are inside nvim, it may work as expected as long +as $SSH_TTY is set. I sometimes physically start a session, +and ssh into the same session later from another machine, +and $SSH_TTY remains unset, so I force OSC-52 in +nvim at all times (see nvimdoc):

vim.g.clipboard = {
+  name = 'OSC 52',
+  copy = {
+    ['+'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').copy('+'),
+    ['*'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').copy('*'),
+  },
+  paste = {
+    ['+'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').paste('+'),
+    ['*'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').paste('*'),
+  },
+}

If you are inside nvim inside tmux inside +an ssh session inside st, you neeed all of the +above tweaks. nvim will pass the contents around to +tmux, which in turn will pass the contents to +st, which should pass it to your system clipboard.

+ +

+ Hi. +

+ Subscribe +

I'm Akshay, programmer and pixel-artist. + I write open-source stuff. + I also design fonts: + scientifica, + curie. +

Reach out at oppili@irc.rizon.net.

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