Clipboard and OSC 52

Clipboard and OSC 52

slk writes the system clipboard via the OSC 52 escape. Most modern terminal emulators (alacritty, kitty, wezterm, foot, iterm2, recent gnome-terminal) accept these writes by default. A few need explicit opt-in.

Terminal-specific setup

• tmux: set -g set-clipboard on in your tmux config.
• screen: has no working OSC 52 path; consider switching to tmux.
• kitty (older versions): clipboard_control write-clipboard in kitty.conf.

Diagnosing silent failures

If Copied N chars shows in the status bar but nothing lands in your clipboard, your terminal is silently dropping the OSC 52 write. There is no reliable round-trip to detect this from inside slk — the protocol doesn't acknowledge writes. Check your terminal's clipboard documentation for an opt-in setting.

Related

• Terminal Compatibility — per-terminal OSC 52 support summary