> You can't have it all with the mouse no matter your settings

> so I went back to just using the cursor to move things around.

These tools (vim, tmux, etc.) work great for mouseless setups. If you can get comfortable with a 100% keyboard control paradigm, it might work for you. I realize this might not be what you want, but if the statement "spend less time moving your hand between keyboard and mouse" resonates, it's worth revisiting.

With xclip, mouse and copy/paste can work over SSH-forwarded X-sessions with C-y and Enter from copy-mode-vi so:

  # For older versions of tmux:
  #setw -g mode-mouse on
  #set -g mouse-resize-pane on
  #set -g mouse-select-pane on
  #set -g mouse-select-window on
  # For newer versions of tmux:
  set -g mouse on
  bind -n WheelUpPane if-shell -F -t = "#{mouse_any_flag}" "send-keys -M" "if -Ft= '#{pane_in_mode}' 'send-keys -M' 'select-pane -t=; copy-mode -e; #send-keys -M'"
  bind -n WheelDownPane select-pane -t= \; send-keys -M

  set -g set-clipboard on
  # With xclip
  bind-key -n C-y run "tmux show-buffer | xclip -selection clipboard -i >/dev/null"
  #bind-key -n C-y run-shell "tmux save-buffer - | xclip -i -selection clipboard >/dev/null"
  # For tmux 2.4+
  bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Enter send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel 'xclip -selection clipboard -i'

My preference is to reduce visual clutter in tmux by tweaking config and mostly just follow built-in bindings so workflow mostly works on standard tmux as well.

When clipboard fails between environments, sometimes multiple copy-ing, and then pasting into a text-editor helps (not a tmux issue, but clipboard-integrations).

X servers on Windows are often a bigger cut/paste barrier than tmux. As you mention, vcxsrv seems to work better than other choices. Note there are some cut/paste/clipboard options you have to set.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  
  <XLaunch WindowMode="MultiWindow" ClientMode="NoClient" LocalClient="False" Display="0" LocalProgram="xcalc" RemoteProgram="xterm" RemotePassword="" PrivateKey="" RemoteHost="" RemoteUser="" XDMCPHost="" XDMCPBroadcast="False" XDMCPIndirect="False" Clipboard="True" ClipboardPrimary="True" ExtraParams="" Wgl="True" DisableAC="False" XDMCPTerminate="False"/>

  # For tmux 2.6+
  set -s set-clipboard external

https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-copycat

The other change is to use vi keys for highlight mode:

    # set highlight mode keys
    setw -g mode-keys vi
    bind Escape copy-mode

   bind-key P command-prompt -p 'save history to filename:' -I '~/tmux.history' 'capture-pane -S -32768 ; save-buffer %1 ; delete-buffer'

C-Space marks a region, move arrows to select text, and M-w to copy to clipboard.

q to escape copy mode

This seems to be to the tmux's own clipboard. When you want to copy externally many lines, you can use C-b Z to zoom or use a lame workaround with text files opened in gedit or something. (It's a marginal use case in my experience, so I didn't bother to optimize.)

    bind-key -T copy-mode-vi 'v' send -X begin-selection
    bind-key -T copy-mode-vi 'y' send -X copy-pipe-and- 
    cancel 'xclip -in -selection clipboard'

#makes clipboard work

set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l fish"

bind-key -T copy-mode-vi 'v' send -X begin-selection

bind-key -T copy-mode-vi 'y' send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "reattach-to-user-namespace pbcopy"

    bind -Tcopy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane copy-pipe-and-cancel "if [ \"$(uname)\" = 'Darwin' ]; then pbcopy; else xclip; fi"

[1]: >= 2.4, maybe?

[2]: Any terminal that supports OSC52 (e.g, iTerm2)

[3]: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/commit/5aba26f2cb7aa9609a3c3d2b...

If formatting is super important, I paste into a file with cat > file, and read the file into Emacs. I can do the same in reverse for a big copy out, and transfer the file.

I do these things because I often use Emacs in a ssh session instead of tramp, because I'm coming from a different OS or need to use modes with sidecar executables, e.g. enh-ruby-mode.

https://github.com/hujun-open/rclip

I don't think this is correct; it's just that it's not trivial to get things working well. As you say, it depends on using an up-to-date version of tmux (and sadly, you often can't run a config made for a new version with an older version of tmux). And you'll need your terminal to be up to the task (eg. iTerm2 on macOS; not sure what the best thing on Linux would be).

This config shows some useful mouse settings, along with transparent integration with system clipboard via Clipper (even when running tmux on a remote host):

https://github.com/wincent/wincent/blob/81e4b5dc180dd22d8b47...

But like I said, getting it all working nicely requires a bit of work, especially if you want things to work uniformly across Vim, tmux and the shell. Once you've got it all working though, it's great. I can scroll with trackpad or mouse wheel inside and outside of Vim, click or drag to select text (and double-click to select words, triple-click to select lines) both inside and outside of Vim, I can drag tmux or Vim splits etc.

Having sad that, I rarely need or want to take my hands off the keyboard when in the terminal nowadays.

https://youtube.com/channel/UCXPHFM88IlFn68OmLwtPmZA

Recently I have been a big fan of tmux+Alacritty on linux.

Doesn't this kinda defeat the point of Vim? I turned on vim bindings and went through an excruciating learning process just to keep my hands on the keyboard. Moving between keyboard and mouse or trackpad was causing significant wrist issues.

As much as I love tmux, I wonder what would it take that the program respects the usual copy-paste conventions like all the rest of X programs. You need to do two things, that are apparently impossible when tmux has "mouse enabled":

1. select some text in your xterm so that it gets copied

2. middle click on the xterm and your copied text (possibly from other window, web browser, whatever) gets pasted at the cursor position

This is really simple and sane behavior but it's completely impossible to achieve with the current version of tmux. I have spend much more time that I am willing to admit seriously trying to do that.

I've run this setup now for something like 5 years across multiple tmux versions and OSes (Ubuntu and Arch) without any hiccups.

But then I think tmux is a tool geared towards keyboard usage and not mouse. The mouse stuff was added because others wanted it, not because it was part of the core idea of what tmux wanted to provide. So if you go against that, you'll bang your head a little.

Sure, but this is the internal "copy mode" of tmux, and is not useful to copy text in and out of your terminal.

In most terminal emulators you can also use Shift (or sometimes a different modifier) to bypass application mouse mode and have the terminal emulator handle the mouse event. Of course you can't copy out of the history with this, but that is another limitation of terminal emulators.

This seems more an excuse than a cause. When the "mouse mode" of tmux is off, the copy-paste mechanism works perfectly. There is no reason why this couldn't still be the case when the mouse mode is on. For example, tmux could enable the mouse only for scrolling and resizing the panes, while keeping the correct copy paste behavior intact. But it chooses not to.

Or you could read it with `xclip`, `xsel` or `pbpaste`, something like:

    bind -n MouseDown2Pane run "pbpaste|tmux loadb -" \; pasteb

Tagline from GitHub:

> Tmux plugin for copying to system clipboard

https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank

I could understand if you don't like tmux for other reasons (being a heavy mouse-user for example), that makes perfect sense. It's not for everyone. But if you take some time to understand why some things don't work like you expect it to (like what's the difference between a terminal emulator and tmux, what they have access to and so on) and how you could solve them, you'd avoid the issues you're describing.

But again, tmux is a tool aimed for keyboard users, not mouse. This tool doesn't fit everyone, and that's ok too. If you're willing to try it, you need to understand a few things before it'll work as you expect, otherwise your expectations will be wrong.

I love tmux and I'm primarily a keyboard user. But sometimes I like to copy a short string from one window to another. Does tmux-yank allow you to middle-click paste on a tmux window? does it allow to select to copy?

For the "select to copy", all the information you need is in the GitHub repository previously linked. Here it is again: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank The specific section you're looking for is here: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank#mouse-support

It's simple for you to try it out as well, have a read about tmux plugins and you'll be up and running in a yiffy.

Also take some time to read up on terminal emulators, shells and what tmux is, as you seem to hold slightly off assumptions around where the problems you're experiencing are actually coming from. The reading and understanding will only make your personal knowledge base larger and deeper :)

To get pasting from the system clipboard, you need something like https://github.com/brennanfee/tmux-paste It will copy whatever's on the system clipboard into tmux's paste buffer, and paste it, all with a single middle-click.

I've only recently started using tmux, and all this clipboard stuff was the biggest stumbling block. But I think I've got things work well enough now.

tmux-yank copies whatever you selected to the system clipboard (xclip, clip.exe, etc.)

Perhaps a solution could be combining a terminal and tmux into one product, so there would be no more excuses, however I don't think core devs are interested in getting a proper mouse support working in tmux.

My point exactly. I want to do that without pressing shift.

I did modify the key binds a little bit to make splitting windows and enable the mouse, but otherwise I just don’t need any more advanced behavior.

One change I made was forcing myself to always name a window when it gets created - that way I can usually hotkey back into an environment by its name, rather than having to go searching for windows.

I particularly like that I can use exactly the same toolset on my Mac, Windows, and Linux clients.