How to setup visidata to use tmux clipboard?

[kyhung]

Hello,
I use visidata inside a tmux session, which is run in a remote ssh shell. I configured tmux to use OSC52 clipboard and I can copy and paste from the local clipboard without problem. However, I'm unable to make visidata to work with the tmux clipboard, I set the following options but doesn't seems to work.

options.clipboard_copy_cmd = 'tmux load-buffer -w -'
options.clipboard_paste_cmd = 'tmux paste-buffer'

Any insight / help is appreciated, thank you!

[midichef]

I just got clipboard working in alacritty + ssh + tmux + visidata. So I know it's possible there. Trying to test it under kitty, I ran into setup issues, so I didn't get to try it with kitty. But here's the process for alacritty, v0.15.1 with tmux v3.4:

Put a line in ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml to allow paste:

[terminal]
osc52 = "CopyPaste"   #default value is OnlyCopy, which does not allow paste.

Change .tmux.conf to allow applications in tmux to set the clipboard:

set-option -s set-clipboard on      #the default value is "external"

Create a shell script tmux-paste in your PATH which will read the system clipboard into tmux, and add a delay to wait for the read to finish:

#!/bin/sh
tmux refresh-client -l
# wait for system clipboard to be read:  necessary because of https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/4074
sleep 0.05  
tmux save-buffer -

And finally .visidatarc sets the copy/paste commands:

options.clipboard_copy_cmd = 'tmux load-buffer -w -'
#tmux-paste is a shell-script in the PATH
options.clipboard_paste_cmd = 'tmux-paste'

The paste command you gave will not work. But your copy command is correct. I don't know why it's not working. Are you using the right vd commands? You want to use the vd command syscopy-cell, with the keypress zY. You don't want copy-cell from the keypress zy. And for paste, you'll want syspaste-cells, with zP.

To narrow down where the problem may be, I would suggest you try testing the commands tmux load-buffer -w - and tmux refresh-client -l; sleep 0.05; tmux save-buffer - from the command line in your tmux, and see if they are working there.