Vim: copy and paste with the mouse

When Vim has mouse support switched on, selecting text with the mouse starts Vim's own visual mode instead of selecting text in your terminal, so you cannot copy it to your computer's clipboard. Pasting with the mouse can also mangle indentation. Many Linux distributions switch the mouse on by default (Vim's defaults.vim sets mouse=a), and so do many ~/.vimrc files copied from elsewhere.

To see whether this affects you, type :set mouse? in Vim. An empty value (mouse=) means the mouse is off and selecting works as in any other terminal program.

Hold Shift while selecting

The quickest workaround needs no configuration: hold Shift while you select or paste with the mouse, and the terminal handles the mouse itself. This works in most terminals on Linux and Windows (GNOME Terminal, Konsole, xterm, Windows Terminal, PuTTY). On macOS, hold Option in iTerm2 or Fn in Terminal.

Switch the mouse off

For the current Vim session, type:

:set mouse=

To make it permanent, add the line set mouse= to ~/.vimrc. If you do not have a ~/.vimrc yet, create it with this content:

unlet! skip_defaults_vim
source $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim
set mouse=

The first two lines keep Vim's usual defaults (syntax highlighting and similar): Vim loads them only when no ~/.vimrc exists, so a ~/.vimrc containing just set mouse= would turn them off too.