Copy text through SSH in Vim/Neovim with OSC52

TL;DR: OSC52 is an ANSI escape sequence that allows you to copy text into your system clipboard from anywhere, including from remote SSH sessions. Check vim-oscyank, a plugin which integrates OSC52 into Vim.

What is OSC52?

OSC stands for Operating System Command, a category of ANSI escape sequences which instruct the terminal emulator to perform certain actions.

OSC52 is one of these sequence and tells the terminal that the string it carries must be copied to the system clipboard. Typically, an application encodes a string in base64, prefixes it with the OSC52 sequence and outputs it. The terminal parses the OSC sequence and updates the clipboard.

Why is it useful?

OSC52 is totally location-independent. The terminal does not care from where the sequence was emitted, even if it comes from a remote SSH session. It is especially useful in Vim since you are now able copy to your system clipboard from basically anywhere.

How do I use it?

The only requirement is that the terminal must support the sequence. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the status of popular terminal emulators regarding OSC52 (as of November 2020):

Terminal	OSC52 support
Alacritty	yes
GNOME Terminal (and other VTE-based terminals)	not yet
hterm (Chromebook)	yes
iTerm2	yes
kitty	yes
screen	yes
tmux	yes
Windows Terminal	yes
rxvt	yes (to be confirmed)
urxvt	yes (with a script, see here)

I’ve developed a very simple plugin to use the OSC52 protocol: vim-oscyank. It basically takes a visual selection, encodes it in base64 and wraps it with OSC52. Check the plugin’s README for installation and usage.