Can't paste into MacVim - clipboard

I copy text from outside of Vim. ⌘V in other apps pastes text without problem. In MacVim, it doesn't work.
In Insert Mode, nothing appears. In Normal Mode, I get E353: Nothing in register +. This happens when set clipboard=unnamed is on or off.
Oddly enough, this was working before. What's wrong?

If you are using tmux and sometimes you initially launch MacVim via the mvim command-line program, then you might be encountering the problem that prompted me to write the reattach-to-user-namespace command.
My guess is that clipboard access worked on prior occasions because you happened to have launched MacVim via a “normal” GUI method (e.g. the dock, Finder, Spotlight, etc.). The clipboard later became inaccessible after you had quit the prior instance of MacVim and relaunched it through (e.g.) mvim from inside a tmux session.
The core problem is that programs launched in certain contexts (i.e. inside a tmux session) end up with an environment that denies them access to certain services (e.g. the OS X pasteboard).
The initial launch is the important one here. New windows started by mvim-in-tmux (even without the above-linked wrapper program) should have access to the clipboard as long as MacVim was previously started “via the GUI” (maybe there are still some MacVim windows open, or maybe you have MacVim configured to keep running even when there are no windows open). Correspondingly, to regain access to the clipboard you will need to close all your existing MacVim windows, quit the application, then restart it in a way that has access to the clipboard (e.g. via the GUI, or “inside” the wrapper).
Once you have the above-linked wrapper program installed (it is also available through MacPorts and Homebrew), you can use a command like reattach-to-user-namespace mvim to ensure that if it ends up starting a new MacVim instance, then that new instance will have access to the clipboard. You might use an alias, shell function, or a script to make sure you always “wrap” mvim.
Several other commands also benefit from “wrapping” (pbpaste, pbcopy, nohup, launchctl (depending on which subcommand you are using)), so you may want to “wrap” your whole shell instead of the individual commands. The bit of the process environment that the “wrapper” modifies is inherited by child processes, so “wrapping” your shell will affect most commands you run from it. If you are using tmux, you could configure your default-command to automatically “wrap” your default tmux shells:
set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh"

Related

How to open a file in emacs from the terminal without a new instance of emacs opening?

Does anyone know why my terminal opens a new instance of emacs whenever I run emacs "filename" from my terminal?
My google results about the issue showed too many occurrences of people trying to do this liberately, but my emacs is doing this by default for some reason.
I've found no resolving cases in my init.el or ~/.zshrc
If emacs is already running, you can start a server (M-x start-server) from within emacs, and open files with emacsclient on the command line. You may create an alias for that.
Spacemacs has a dotspacemacs-enable-server setting in your init.el file (SPC f e d) to always enable the server.
This is a pretty normal default behavior for any program. If you have a cat process running in one terminal, and you run cat again in another, they're not going to somehow share: you get two copies of cat running. The same thing applies to emacs. There are configuration options to change this, basically by making the first instance of emacs act as a server. Then the second emacs still starts a new process, but instead of continuing to set up a brand new editor it just sends information to the server process.

My emacs client automagically terminates when switching applications [OSX iTerm2]

I try to be brave and switch from vi to emacs.
Now, I set up Emacs 26 on macOS via homebrew and start Emacs as daemon in the background.
I can use files using emacsclient -t. However, whenever I bring the Terminal into the background emacsclient exits within a few seconds.
See example Video here: https://cloud.familie-ganter.de/s/QwbK8cFBHnPjQ4d
I did a plain install. My init file does not contain anything except what you see in the video. The funny thing is whenever I start emacs directly in the Terminal, nothing at all happens when bringing it to the background.
What seems to be the problem?
I am lost …
I expect it to be something dumb and simple -- so please be nice, this is my first stackoverflow post.

System default voice doesn't change on `say` command within tmux sessions

Recently I've changed my default system voice via "System Preferences > Dictation & Speech > Text to Speech > System Voice". If I open a new Terminal window and use the say command, the correct voice is used. However, the previous voice is still used if I use the say command within a tmux session.
I've tried restarting, shutting down tmux completely, and opening an entirely new tmux session with tmux new-session -s foobar and still it doesn't pick up the new preferred voice.
This is really a minor issue, but it eats at me that I have no idea why it's happening. Any ideas?
I'm pretty sure this is the same root cause as that other issue: many tools that need to interact with the UI (graphics, sounds...) fail within a tmux session: say, pbcopy/pbpaste, nohup, launchctl export|getenv|setenv, subl (Sublime Text command line tool), Retina rendering of apps launched under tmux, tools trying to access KeyChain (curl, ssh...), etc.
I remember GNU screen used to have the same problem but Apple patched it and now it works fine, but tmux still has the problem.
Solution (2017-05)
Borrowing from answers in linked issue, for tmux you can do this if you have Homebrew:
brew install reattach-to-user-namespace
Then put the following in your ~/.tmux.conf:
set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l $SHELL"
I reproduced your issue on macOS 10.11.4, and the above fixed it.
See here for more info on the nature of the problem, and its workaround (using undocumented macOS APIs)
Better solution soon?
As mentioned in comment, future versions of tmux might do this dance natively, at least it's being worked on, and current master has the fix.

Cannot open multiple files with Emacs on Mac

I can open a single file with Emacs, no problem. But I'm used to Emacs on Linux, where typing emacs test.cpp & would open a new Emacs frame, leaving the terminal free. On OS X, however, when I try to open a new frame with emacs test.cpp &, the terminal shows a process was created but the window fails to pop up. If I push Ctrl+C, the terminal shows "Stopped", but I see the process is still running because I can see it in the task monitor.
How to solve this problem? Thanks!
The issue here is that the command emacs on Linux is generally just the Emacs binary itself, which opens a new frame (that's Emacs-speak for X11 or other GUI window) unless you specify -nw on the command line; in contrast, the emacs command provided by Homebrew is a shell script that calls /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw "$#" (substituting the version installed for 24.3). So the Homebrew version launches as a terminal app.
You can make a shell script that just runs /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/24.3/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$#", and it would behave somewhat as you expect, except that you would be launching a brand-new instance of the Mac app, which would cause an additional Emacs icon to appear on the Dock. Such a thing isn't considered "Mac-like," but it's not the end of the world.
An alternate solution, which is used a lot across different operating systems, is to make one Emacs process a server and then use emacsclient to open files from the command line. Emacsclient can open files in the current terminal, a new frame (GUI window), or an existing instance of Emacs. For an instance of Emacs to run as a server just requires that you run M-x server-start within it, or put (server-start) inside your init file (~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el).
My Emacs config has this snippet, which starts server mode automatically when I launch the GUI app:
(when (display-graphic-p)
(server-start))
Then, once Emacs is running (you can make it autostart upon login in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items), type emacsclient -nw test.cpp to open the file in the terminal, or emacsclient test.cpp & to open it in an existing frame, or emacsclient -c test.cpp & to open a new frame. (Note that if you open it in an existing frame, you use C-x # to close the buffer without closing the frame, as opposed to C-x C-c.)
Note that the terminal emacsclient command I gave just now didn't use & but the GUI ones did. & at the end of a command line puts the process in the background, meaning it's not monopolizing your terminal. For whatever reason (probably because it wouldn't be sensible to have a full-screen terminal app running in the background), when you invoke the terminal version of Emacs with &, it just suspends itself. The same thing would happen if you pressed C-z within Emacs. To get it back into the foreground, type fg (actually you can have multiple background processes, in which case fg would just pick the most recent one unless you specified a job specifier; see bash's man page (man bash) and search for JOB CONTROL if you're interested in the details).

Launching server emacs from shell

I'm in a class that uses an implementation of Emacs on a school server. I'm on a mac running snow leopard, and I have my own implementation of Emacs on it. To access the server-Emacs, I ssh into the server and launch Emacs from its location there.
I'm relativly new to emacs, and I have a particular problem whenever I try to access the server-emacs from my local-emacs' shell-mode, having ssh'd into the server. It gives me the error that "Screen size -1x80 is too small", and doesn't launch the server-emacs.
I've the separate issue that when I try to do this in Apple's terminal, it does launch the server-emacs, but I really, really dislike the interface when emacs is launched within a terminal.
I've tried a couple of times to launch the server-emacs within a new window, in both scenarios, but apparently I'm not doing it right.
I think it'd be useful to understand what you're trying to do.
Do you just want to edit files on the server? If that's the case, read the documentation for tramp, and try:
C-x C-f //user#server:/path/to/file
If you really want to use the emacs running on the server, try creating a frame on your
(if so, look up tramp) If you want to actually use the emacs from the server, but have the window display on your mac:
ssh server
setenv DISPLAY mymac:0
emacsclient file &
This does assume you're running X11, and know how to resolve the display for your Mac. You can get X11 for the Mac here.
It's a bit hard to tell what you are doing, but you probably want to ssh to the server with an X tunnel, then run emacs there which will pop up the window on your mac.
First, don't use Terminal.
On your mac, start up X11 (google for XQuartz if you don't already have it).
Start up an XTerm (it should do this by default). From that XTerm, ssh to your server with the -Y option:
ssh -Y me#server.something
This should get you a remote shell and setup the DISPLAY environment to tunnel right back to your Mac's X server. Test it by running an xterm from there. If that works, you can instead run emacs. If that works, you can combine it with the ssh invocation:
ssh -Y me#server.something /usr/bin/emacs # or whatever path you need
You should set up ssh to not require a password but that's more than you asked for.
I think that Trey Jackson's suggestion of tramp (or the more old-fashioned 'ange-ftp) is probably your best bet.
In general, running emacs inside an emacs is never a good idea. You either want to run emacs on the server (in -nw mode inside the terminal, or via some $DISPLAY magic) or run it on your mac (via tramp). There isn't really a good way to do both.

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