deferred-clipboard.nvim

Overview

This plugin synchronizes the clipboard of your operating system with Neovim's unnamed register ("), while avoiding the performance issue of clipboard=unnamed and clipboard=unnamedplus.

It works both ways so you can yank something in Neovim to be available in your OS, but also copy something in your OS and put in Neovim.

The content of system clipboard will also be written to the unnamed register (") on .setup() if its empty, and read from unnamed register (") just before Neovim exits, so your latest yank won't be lost even if your client doesn't support focus change events.

Vim

Apparently the performance issue is specific to Neovim and does not apply to Vim.

Requirements

• Neovim >= 0.7.0
• (optional, recommended) Neovim client which supports both focus change events - FocusGained and FocusLost

Installation

Use your favorite package manager. For example vim-plug:

Plug 'EtiamNullam/deferred-clipboard.nvim'

Usage

Setup

Best compatibility

require('deferred-clipboard').setup {
  fallback = 'unnamedplus', -- or your preferred setting for clipboard
}

If fallback is specified it will be applied as your clipboard setting until support for focus change events is detected in your terminal or Neovim client. This way you will get a consistent behavior, no matter if focus change events are supported or not.

Best performance

You can use lazy option, off by default, to improve startup time by delaying access of system clipboard. Make sure to disable it if you run into any trouble, for example if you load shada on launch but still want the clipboard to be loaded into unnamed register (").

require('deferred-clipboard').setup {
  lazy = true,
}

Basic

require('deferred-clipboard').setup()

It is required to call setup() to start the plugin, which will load the system clipboard to the unnamed register ("), hook up focus change events and disable continuous clipboard sync if it's enabled.

Calling it with no arguments will use default settings.

force_init_unnamed

By default clipboard will be copied to your unnamed register (") on setup only when it's empty. If your unnamed register might not be empty and you want to make sure its loaded from your clipboard on setup you can use force_init_unnamed option:

require('deferred-clipboard').setup {
  force_init_unnamed = true
}

API

Other than setup() described before, this plugin exposes a simple API. There is no need to call setup() prior to using it.

read() -> string | nil

It will load content of your system clipboard and place it in your unnamed register ("). It will also return the content of system clipboard unless it's invalid, in that case it will return nil.

Example:

local clipboard = require('deferred-clipboard')

local clipboard_content = clipboard.read()

local is_clipboard_content_invalid = clipboard_content == nil

write(content?: string)

If called with no argument it will simply write your unnamed register (") to system clipboard.

If called with argument it will write the specified content to your system clipboard.

Example:

vim.keymap.set('n', 'x', function()
  require('deferred-clipboard').write()
end)

vim.keymap.set('n', 'X', function()
  require('deferred-clipboard').write('example')
end)

Known issues

• Clipboard will not be synchronized if Neovim is busy or when hit-enter-prompt is open