How do I paste from PuTTY into Vim 8.0?

Question

Scenario

From a Windows 10 Anniversary Update client ...

• Open a web browser, copy / paste some text from a website (eg. GitHub)
• Use PuTTY 0.67 to SSH to a Linux VM (eg. Ubuntu 16 Xenial Xerus)
• Open a file in Vim
• Hit i to change into Insert mode
• Right-click to paste the clipboard contents

Issue

Unfortunately, when I right-click in the PuTTY session, rather than pasting clipboard contents, what's actually happening is that Vim is going from INSERT mode to (insert) VISUAL mode. I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before.

Question

Does anyone know why this is happening, and how I can paste my Windows client clipboard into the SSH / Vim session?

Answer 1

It appears that this issue is due to a change in defaults for VIM version 8.0 and higher.

Previous versions had mouse mode turned off ( mouse= ), but the new default is mouse mode turned on ( mouse=a ).

There are 3 ways to deal with this situation:

1. Adapt to it : With mouse mode turned on, the new way to paste is shift-right-click (at least in PuTTY)
2. Change it : You can turn off mouse mode for your current VIM session by typing :set mouse= and <enter>
3. Revert it : You can override the new defaults by calling VIM with the "C" switch ( vim -C {filename} ) and it will revert back to the Vi "compatible" settings for that session

Of course you can always add set mouse= to your .vimrc file to make it permanent. But that doesn't work for me because I hop around on too many different systems.

Answer 2

我通过关闭鼠标模式解决了这个问题。

:set mouse=

Answer 3

I faced the same problem

1. You just need to change in the vmrc file vim $HOME/.vimrc
2. set the following in the file set mouse-=a to .vimrc

It worked fine