Every modern terminal emulator supports ANSI OSC-52 out-of-the-box. xterm
is not one of those1.
OSC-52 allows one to copy text into the system clipboard. It’s a very handy escape sequence to be used alongside terminal emulators and terminal multiplexers such as tmux/screen.
It’s also possible to enable OSC-52 in vim, making copy-and-paste a first-class citizen therein.
As mentioned in the intro, most modern applications already support it out-of-the-box, as such there’s no need to configure them. We would like to configure xterm as well though, because it is widely available in pretty much every Unix out there.
$ grep -B 1 -i allowWindowOps ~/.Xresources
! osc-52 support
*.allowWindowOps: true
Then apply:
$ xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
All new xterm applications should then pick up the new resource.
maybe because it’s not modern, and it’s not decent? ;) ↩︎