Clipboard failure in tmux + vim after upgrading to MacOS Sierra

Question

Yesterday, I upgraded to MacOS Sierra and it broke my clipboard functionality in my tmux + neovim setup.

Here is the behavior:

• I can use the standard ctrl+

Answer 1

Upgrading brew + vim + tmux fixed this for me:

brew update
brew upgrade vim
brew upgrade tmux

Notes:

• I am not using Neovim but hopefully this will help anyway
• This may take a while depending on how slow your machine is
• When I did this brew upgraded ruby for me and it complained that it wouldn't overwrite the existing symlinks so I had to manually run: brew link --overwrite ruby
• Tmux complained about the following setting after the upgrade. I just commented it out: # set-option -g status-utf8 on
• I had a warning about needing the new xcode tools so I ran the following and accepted the GUI prompts: xcode-select --install (In hindsight this may mess up my react-native install :/. Buyer beware)
• When first running brew update brew complained it didn't have write access to /usr/local so I made myself the owner of /usr/local NON-RECURSIVE. After the update brew told me I could change the owner back to root:wheel.

Answer 2

This seem to be a regression on macOS Sierra. A solution that worked for me has been mentioned by Josh McGinnis https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/543:

brew install reattach-to-user-namespace

Ensure the following is set in .tmux.conf:

set -g default-shell $SHELL 
set -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l ${SHELL}"

In .vimrc or ~/.config/nvim/init.vim (for Neovim):

set clipboard=unnamed

Now all is well and I can copy/paste between system <-> vim sessions using vim keybindings and/or system ctrl+c / ctrl+p.

Answer 3

I saw the same upon upgrading to Sierra. In my case it stemmed from having the YankRing plugin installed.

Adding the following to my .vimrc fixed it for me:

"-------------------------------------------------------------
" Fix for YankRing bug
"-------------------------------------------------------------
let g:yankring_clipboard_monitor=0