If you have asked yourself “how to enable clipboard on Vim?” or “is it possible to access the system clipboard on Vim?“, the answer is: yes. This is how you can do it.
Note: in this example I’m using FreeBSD, but the principle is the same in other *nixes.
First, you need to get sure that you installed Vim package was compiled with xterm_clipboard compatibility. If instead of +xterm_clipboard you see -xterm_clipboard, your Vim package was not compiled with clipboard support.
$ vim --version | grep -i clipboard +clipboard +keymap +printer +vertsplit +eval -mouse_jsbterm -sun_workshop +xterm_clipboard
If this happens to be your case, then you should install the vim-x11-* package, or in my case (as I was interested in have GVim installed), the vim-gtk3-* package.
$ sudo pkg install vim-gtk3-9.0.0016
Now you should have access to the desktop clipboard.
