How do I enable OSC52 on Mosh and SSH?

[iflowerml]

Can I copy/paste between a remote machine and my device? How do I enable OSC52 between a remote machine and my device? How can I copy text to the system clipboard across Mosh, SSH, tmux, screen, Emacs, and Vim?

[iflowerml]

CLI applications, specially editors, regularly use their clipboard to perform copy or yank operations. OSC52 is an ANSI control sequence used to instruct the terminal to copy the string it carries to the system clipboard, even through remote connections over SSH and Mosh.

Mosh supports the OSC52 sequence out of the box since version 1.4.0, so make sure your mosh-server is up to date.

Then, you just need to instruct the specific CLI application to make use of the OSC52 sequence. Here is how to do so, and please chime in on this thread to add others!

Vim:
To enable copy/paste you’ll need to install ojroques/vim-oscyank and add the following line to .vimrc:

autocmd TextYankPost * if v:event.operator is 'y' && v:event.regname is '' | OSCYankReg " | endif"

then enable this setting:

set clipboard& clipboard^=unnamed,unnamedplus

Emacs:
To enable copy/paste on Emacs, you can install clipetty. Check out the GitHub repo for the complete documentation. Enable use-package, by adding this to your config:

(use-package clipetty
:ensure t
:hook (after-init . global-clipetty-mode))

TMUX:
To enable copy/paste between tmux and your device, insert the following lines into your tmux.conf:

set -g set-clipboard on
# allow other apps to passthrough sequences (including OSC52)
set -g allow-passthrough on
set -ag terminal-overrides "vte*:XT:Ms=\\E]52;c;%p2%s\\7,xterm*:XT:Ms=\\E]52;c;%p2%s\\7"

[carloscabanero]

Other tips to figure out in case you have issues with OSC-52:

• It is important to figure out if the problem is on the terminal or in the application. To do so, on a clean terminal shell, run:

printf "\033]52;c;Y29weXBhc3RhIQ==\a\n"

And copypasta! should show up in the clipboard.

• This is another good link for resources: https://seankhliao.com/blog/12020-05-14-osc-52/

[shlevy]

In addition to @iflowerml‘s answer, you can also use the osc tool on the command line:

$ echo "copied by osc" | (unset SSH_TTY; osc copy)

Note that the unset SSH_TTY is needed because mosh-server is erroneously inheriting this variable from the SSH session; this will likely be fixed in a future version of blink

[carloscabanero]

Now tracked on #1957