tmux - find solution for copying from a remote server to my local clipboard

[Notgnoshi]

• two nested tmux sessions
• same .bashrc and .tmux.conf on both systems
• use copy-mode on the remote session to copy to my local clipboard?
  • There won't be a builtin way to do this, as the two tmux sessions don't know about each other
  • I'll likely need my .ssh/config or similar to setup an ssh tunnel I can pipe / netcat my clipboard through
• remote server doesn't have a window manager or a clipboard

[Notgnoshi]

I think I could run a persistent SSH tunnel on my local host like

sshclip user@host

that sets up an nc tunnel for clip locally, and a <tmux something> on the remote server.
sshclip could be a thin shim around ssh that forwards all CLI arguments, and starts the nc | clip tunnel?

How will EOF work?

That tmux config will need to enable/disable itself based on ... the presence of a clipboard?
I think that means I'll need to conditionally enable the tmux-yank plugin, and then add keybinds that try to use the nc tunnel, if it exists, and otherwise ... send the output to a tmpfile?

[Notgnoshi]

After a little more research, I think that using OSC 52 is going to be simpler, and easier to support in both vim and tmux.

https://github.com/ojroques/vim-oscyank

https://github.com/jirutka/tty-copy

https://github.com/aymanbagabas/shcopy

https://github.com/isontheline/webssh.sh

https://miek.nl/2024/january/31/osc52-my-cut-paste-journey/

See "Manipulate Selection Data" from https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h3-Operating-System-Commands

• limited to ~74KB
• gnome-terminal doesn't look like it supports it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495

I think the nc / clip route will work best.

[Notgnoshi]

Using socat worked way better than nc, which seemed to struggle with input/output buffering?

The next step is to adjust my vimrc and tmux.conf to use clip instead of system clipboard integration. Then I can remove the gvim and ~/.local/bin/vim shim!

[Notgnoshi]

I think it's actually possible to use clip and sshclip to support pasting my local clipboard on the remote system. There's two variations I can think of:

• There's a local listener that picks up clipboard changes and pushes them over to the remote
• When copying locally with clip, clip itself pushes the local clipboard over to the remote

The difference between the two is the presence of (another) local listener, which I'm not sure I want, especially if it's just going to be querying my clipboard again and again. I think I'd rather have only copies with clip push stuff over to the remote (which is anything copied from the terminal now).