clipboard.providers.wl-copy.enable does not appear to do anything.

[DrVoidest]

Hey, I am just trying to get my clipboard setup for nvim and the clipboard.providers.wl-copy.enable = true does not appear to do anything. I have the following in my config
clipboard = { register = "unnamedplus"; providers.wl-copy.enable = true; }; any idea what I am doing wrong?

[MattSturgeon]

Are you using wayland? (wl-copy is meant for use with wayland).

Do you get any errors? (wl-copy works for me on my config 🤔 )

[DrVoidest]

Sorry for the late reply and thank you for all your help trying to get this to work for me. Yeah, the most I could get to appear in the init.lua is the clipboard = "unnamedplus", but even explicitly copy/pasting from the + regiser does not work. I have rebuilt it multiple time with different stuff enabled, both doing a rebuild test and switch.

[GaetanLepage]

Yeah, the most I could get to appear in the init.lua is the clipboard = "unnamedplus"

The module is not expected to do more than append this line to your init.lua and to add the wl-copy package to the PATH in nvim.
Thus, from what you have tested, it seems that our module behaves correctly. Now, why is that not having effect on your specific system is a mystery...

Can you try the following: In nvim, run :!wl-copy foobar.
Then, go somewhere else on your system (in your web browser for instance), and simply paste.
For me, it writes foobar.

[MattSturgeon]

@GaetanLepage is right, our module is doing what it's supposed to, so something else is weird on your system.

In addition to using wl-copy directly via :!wl-copy foobar you can also check what's in your :checkhealth output.

You can search /provider\.clipboard. I get:

==============================================================================
provider.clipboard: require("provider.clipboard.health").check()

Clipboard (optional) ~
- OK Clipboard tool found: wl-copy

==============================================================================

This should be set by nixvim, but for sanity let's also double check :verbose version. For me I get:

:verbose version
NVIM v0.10.1
Build type: Release
LuaJIT 2.1.1713773202

   system vimrc file: "$VIM/sysinit.vim"
  fall-back for $VIM: "/nix/store/cw0l32s7zs3m0pd59chj1grw39vy29vb-neovim-unwrapped-0.10.1/share/nvim"

Run :checkhealth for more info
Press ENTER or type command to continue

[DrVoidest]

Thank you both, but I think my system is just messed up at this point. I think I might have found the problem, though I was in a root shell editing system files when trying to get it to work, but didn't try testing it as a user. When in a non-root shell, it works, sorry for wasting y'alls time. I assume for security, it is not able to work in a root shell?

[MattSturgeon]

Sounds like maybe wl-copy doesn't work well when used as root?

I assume for security, it is not able to work in a root shell?

Generally, yes. You should do as little as possible as root. It's fairly common for people to run vim as root, but it's probably not the best idea given vim is a large enough piece of software that it could easily have vulnerabilities.

While it's probably overkill, if you were worried about editing root files without running vim as root, you could edit a temporary copy of the file owned by your user, then run cp as root when you're done.

[DrVoidest]

Ok thank you sir

[MattSturgeon]

As a minimum I'd recommend using something like sudo, doas or the new systemd run0 tool, instead of entering a root shell.