You also may want to have a look at the 'clipboard' option described in :help cb. For example, you could put vnoremap '*y in your ~/.vimrc so that you can visually select and press Ctrl+ c to yank to your system's clipboard. You might like to remap this to something more convenient for you. Assuming you have the appropriate compile options, one or the other should work. If all that went over your head, try using '*yy or '+yy to copy a line to your system's clipboard.

See :help x11-selection for more details, but basically the '* is analogous to X11's _PRIMARY_ selection (which usually copies things you select with the mouse and pastes with the middle mouse button) and '+ is analogous to X11's _CLIPBOARD_ selection (which is the clipboard proper). On X11 systems both registers can be used. For instance, on systems that don't use X11 like OSX or Windows, the '* register is used to read and write to the system clipboard. Depending on your system, they may do different things. The '* and '+ registers are for the system's clipboard ( :help registers). Some linux distros supply a minimal vim installation by default, but if you install the vim-gtk or vim-gtk3 package you can get the extra features nonetheless. In this case, vim is not compiled with the +clipboard feature and you'll have to install a different version or recompile it.

Be aware that copying/pasting from the system clipboard will not work if :echo has('clipboard') returns 0.

Paste command mac