Copy to clipboard using vim bindings in Intellij

Both at work and for my personal projects I use Jetbrains IDE’s based on the Intellij platform, Ryder for C# and CLion for Rust and C++. To be more productive using the IDE’s I like to make use of the vim-keybindings plugin. However, there was one downside for me and that was copying from vim to the local Windows clipboard.

For macOS, I don’t really find this an issue because I can still use CMD + C/V, but on Windows (and Linux) the CTRL + C/V keys are mapped to a vim command.

But one benefit of yanking directly to the clipboard is that I don’t have to think about where I want to copy to or paste from. I just use y or p for both use-cases.

Configuration

To configure this behaviour create a file called .ideavim in your local folder, ~, with the following contents.

1
2
$ touch ~/.ideavimrc
$ echo "set clipboard+=unnamed" > ~/.ideavimrc

* Note: The ~ path which directs to your home- or user-folder works on Windows, macOS and Linux.

The .ideavimrc file is a configuration file which is similar to the .vimrc file you might already know/use. The only difference is, is that the .ideavimrc is only applied to the vim keybindings in your intellij IDE. The benefit of this file is, that you can use it on multiple devices or for multiple Intellij IDE’s (Jetbrains, n.d.). Whereas the .vimrc is applied to your system-wide VIvim configuration.

What the set clipboard+=unnamed does is, it will set the clipboard used by Intellij to unnamed, which is also the clipboard that gets synchronized with your OS clipboard.