OSC-52

I use ssh a lot. Copying text from the remote machine to the host machine always sucked. But OSC-52 makes that easy.

OSC-52 is an ANSI escape sequence to write text to the terminal emulator. The terminal emulator, if it understands what is going on, will in turn write this text to the system clipboard.

What this means is some printf magic can send text to your clipboard. I store this one-liner in a script called oclip:

printf "\033]52;c;%s\007" "$(base64 <&0)"

and I run it with:

remote $ cat some_file.txt | oclip

# some_file.txt's contents are now the host's clipboard

The catch

Your terminal emulator must support OSC-52, alacritty and termux seem to support this out of the box. In st, OSC-52 works with this change to config.h:

int allowwindowops = 1;

If you are using tmux, you need to flip this switch on:

set -s set-clipboard on

If you are inside nvim, it may work as expected as long as $SSH_TTY is set. I sometimes physically start a session, and ssh into the same session later from another machine, and $SSH_TTY remains unset, so I force OSC-52 in nvim at all times (see nvimdoc):

vim.g.clipboard = {
  name = 'OSC 52',
  copy = {
    ['+'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').copy('+'),
    ['*'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').copy('*'),
  },
  paste = {
    ['+'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').paste('+'),
    ['*'] = require('vim.ui.clipboard.osc52').paste('*'),
  },
}

If you are inside nvim inside tmux inside an ssh session inside st, you neeed all of the above tweaks. nvim will pass the contents around to tmux, which in turn will pass the contents to st, which should pass it to your system clipboard.