Sharing the Mac Clipboard with Emacs

Doug — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:09:00 -0600

While I’m sharing emacs hacks, I finally got around to researching this and/or figuring it out. I almost always run emacs inside the terminal in a “no window” mode. It’s pretty natural for me to use M-w to copy something from emacs and then try to Cmd-V it in another Terminal window or likewise Cmd-C something in Terminal and then try paste it into emacs with C-y. Until now, I haven’t known how to share the clipboard with emacs.

(defun copy-from-osx ()
  (shell-command-to-string "pbpaste"))

(defun paste-to-osx (text &optional push)
  (let ((process-connection-type nil)) 
      (let ((proc (start-process "pbcopy" "*Messages*" "pbcopy")))
        (process-send-string proc text)
        (process-send-eof proc))))

(setq interprogram-cut-function 'paste-to-osx)
(setq interprogram-paste-function 'copy-from-osx)

This takes advantage of the pbcopy and pbpaste command line programs to access the clipboard and offers them up as elisp method for emacs’ interprogram-*-functions. Easy, peasy, pumkin weasy.

I need to give some props to Mark Aufflick for his post on Automatic Copy from X11 App to Mac OS Clipboard. My paste-to-osx is pretty much a straight rip from him.

@Lathi.net: Sharing the Mac Clipboard with Emacs

Sharing the Mac Clipboard with Emacs