Is OSC52 expected to work in this case?

[grifferz]

Hi,

I have a remote Debian server running tmux and inside the tmux I have a neovim session that's set up with LazyVim. When I am outside of tmux on the remote host, LazyVim's checkhealth reports no clipboard tool. When I am inside tmux it reports tmux as the clipboard-tool.

When I visually select text in Neovim inside tmux, either with the mouse or by vim motions, and yank that into clipboard with "*y, that does seem to end up in tmux's clipboard because I can go to another tmux window and use ctrl-b ] and it pastes what was just selected.

I would like to get that selection into my desktop machine's system clipboard. This works locally, i.e. with neovim running inside a tmux for a local terminal - no ssh. I am running Wayland and GNOME (Debian 12) on my desktop.

I don't know if it is even possible, but my researching has led me to OSC52.

I use gnome-terminal and I see this doesn't support OSC52, so I cloned Alacritty and compiled that. Here's my ~/.config/alacrittty/alacritty.toml:

[window]
dimensions = { columns = 88, lines = 45 }
resize_increments = true

[font]
size = 17.0

[font.normal]
family = "CommitMono Nerd Font"
style = "Regular"

[terminal]
osc52 = "CopyPaste"

My previous experiments with the remote tmux being able to paste what was selected from neovim lead me to believe that neovim and tmux are functioning correctly and it's just a case of getting tmux's buffer through to alacritty. Nothing appears to happen however.

If I run:

printf "\033]52;;$(printf "%s" "blahblah" | base64)\a"

either in a local alacritty, or one running ssh to remote, or running ssh to remote and attached to tmux, I would have expected that to have pushed "blahblah" into my system's selection buffer, but the buffer remains empty.

Should I expect the printf above to work?

Could I expect the whole thing — remote tmux putting its selection into alacritty — to work?

If so, how do I debug?

If not is there any other way aside from X forwarding? Which I'm not even sure will work with Wayland.

I also ran through everything at https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard#the-clipboard for tmux on the remote host and it all seems correct.

Thanks!