How to access os clipboard using Emacs + Evil

Question

How can i yank to/from windows clipboard when using:

• Windows 7 (x64)
• GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (x64)
• Evil 1.0.9
• and having (setq x-select-enable-clipboard nil) in my .emacs? (I put this line there because i didn't want vim changes (x, d, etc) to clobber my os clipboard.

I tried "+p, "*p, "+y, "*y, CTRL+Y but it doesn't work. When i run :registers it doesn't even show + or * registers.

To clarify: I want Emacs to behave like Vim when copying/yanking to/from different registers, without clobbering os clipboard with every text changing command. In particular:

• yy - should NOT yank text to os clipboard (only to 0 register)
• "+yy - should yank text to os clipboard
• dd - should NOT clobber os clipboard
• cw - shold NOT clobber os clipboard
• etc.

Answer 1

I disabled the clipboard integration with:

(setq x-select-enable-clipboard nil)

Then you should still be able to copy and paste using the + register of evil. If you still want to integrate with the clipboard without evil, you could use this function to paste:

(defun paste-from-clipboard ()
  (interactive)
  (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
  (yank)
  (setq x-select-enable-clipboard nil))

and this one for copyping:

(defun copy-to-clipboard()
  (interactive)
  (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
  (kill-ring-save (region-beginning) (region-end))
  (setq x-select-enable-clipboard nil))

Then bind copy-to-clipboard to M-w and paste-from-clipboard to C-y, or other keybinding of your choice.

Edit: I'm running Archlinux. Can't say if this'll work on Windows.

Answer 2

https://github.com/rolandwalker/simpleclip

it cover ALL the use cases on Mac/Linux/Windows/Cygwin.

More specifically, for copy&paste, there are only two commands:

simpleclip-get-contents
simpleclip-set-contents

Feel free to assign short keys.

Answer 3

For people trying this on macOs, I used pbcopy.el. I realize this question was for Windows, but I spent a lot of time trying to get it to work on macOs, so sharing what I used.

To use your system’s clipboard on copy, cut and paste, install pbcopy

To install it, run

1. M-x package-install
2. Press the return key
3. provide pbcopy.el as the package to install
4. Press the return key
5. inside your config file, add:

(require 'pbcopy)
(turn-on-pbcopy)

6. restart emacs