out of nowhere my copying and pasting doesnt work

[picarica]

so ill post a little video to show what is wrong thi happend suddenly and i cannot fix it, i think it happend after i installed xclip.

so what isnt working

• select to copy
  pasting using middle mouse button
  something i forgot

here is video for download

wathch online at gyfcat

[calavicci]

There are two different problems you're having.

First, the missing "I" is because you're not accounting for vi. Vi doesn't know about any clipboard mechanism - it's designed for the console. When you try to paste, you're just sending vi all the keystrokes of the characters in the copied content. The "I" tells vi to enter insert mode, not to put an "I" in the buffer. Since it's therefore then in insert mode, all the rest appears as expected. You might try gvim instead if you really want a vi that behaves in (somewhat) X-typical ways; if that still doesn't make sense, try gedit.

Second, the spacing is wrong because vi doesn't know that you aren't just typing into it. It's got an automatic spacing plugin. Try ":set noautoindent" and ":set nosmartindent" before pasting.

Additionally, note that "highlight to select/middle mouse to paste" is an X mechanism, while "Ctrl+C to select/Ctrl+V to paste" is a separate mechanism provided by your toolkit or some other part of your DE.

[Hu]

First, the missing "I" is because you're not accounting for vi. Vi doesn't know about any clipboard mechanism - it's designed for the console.

That's only partially correct. Modern Vim knows how to interact with the X server, even in console mode. However, the user must take care to tell Vim to load the contents of the X clipboard, not to tell the terminal to use the clipboard. Primary is available as the register *; clipboard is available as the register +. With the right compile options and configuration, Vim running in a terminal can still be an X client and access the clipboard directly. This also enables you to copy text from Vim into the X clipboard, even when the presentation in your terminal is suboptimal (for example, if you had wrap off, or showbreak on).

Second, the spacing is wrong because vi doesn't know that you aren't just typing into it. It's got an automatic spacing plugin. Try ":set noautoindent" and ":set nosmartindent" before pasting.

Why not use :set paste, which is specifically designed and documented for this purpose? It resets more options than you describe, and it knows how to revert them when you :set nopaste later.