I’m currently in the process of trying to migrate from MacVim to a terminal based version of Vim on OS X. There are several motivations for switch (which I won’t go into here), but one of the frustrations I was encountering was lack of a functional asterix or ‘*’ register in Vim, which according to ‘:help registers’, is ‘… for storing and retrieving the selected text for the GUI.’
Solution 1: MacVim’s bundled Vim
One solution to this problem is to use the version of Vim that comes bundled with MacVim. For my version of OS X (Mountain Lion) and MacVim (Snapshot 65) this was possible by setting the following alias:
alias vim=/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim |
Solution 2: Homebrew installed Vim
While the MacVim solution fixed my clipboard problems, I felt a little dirty using MacVim’s version of Vim. Looking around I found an alternative solution; installing the homebrew version of Vim. This assumes you already have homebrew installed (if not, see homebrew’s homepage.)
brew install vim |
Hopefully one of those solutions works for you if you were struggling with the same problem.