Vim "yank" does not seem to work

Question

I'm fairly new to Vim. Tonight, I learned about the "yank" command, but when I try to use it in MacVim, it doesn't do anything. Neither Y nor y{motion} do anything. I tried with a default .vimrc to rule out any weird config issues.

Google-fu is failing me. This feels like a noobie issue. Am I missing something obvious?

Answer 1

yank by itself merely copies the line into a clipboard - you will need to paste it onto the next line or onto the Preceding one to use the copied line. To cut the line as well, use delete.

Answer 2

If you have the setting set clipboard=unnamedplus in your .vimrc then this will not be working.

For OSX you have to use set clipboard=unnamed

For Linux you will probably need to use set clipboard=unnamedplus

Heres the snippet from my personal .vimrc

if system('uname -s') == "Darwin\n"
  set clipboard=unnamed "OSX
else
  set clipboard=unnamedplus "Linux
endif

Answer 3

It does not do anything visible - just like Ctrl-C (Edit/Copy) in other editors. Try the command p (paste) after it - that's the equivalent of Ctrl-V - to put what was yanked into the document.

Answer 4

The yank command pulls text into a clipboard. For example yy simply yanks the current line into the common clipboard. You can "paste" the contents of the clipboard with p. You can also yank into named buffers using something like "ayw to yank the text from the current position to the end of the word into a buffer named a. The correspond put is "ap.

Answer 5

If your using Ubuntu or Mint the only solution that seemed to work for me was to uninstall vim and install the package "vim-gnome" instead. Then adding the line:

set clipboard=unnamedplus

to my .vimrc worked as expected.