How to send rich text to the clipboard from command line?

Solution 1:

Linux

via this answer

cat text.html | xclip -t text/html

Mac

via this answer

cat text.html | textutil -stdin -format html -convert rtf -stdout | pbcopy

Windows

In older Windows, you can natively only copy plaintext (via this answer).

type text.html | clip

In PowerShell you can copy rich text:

type text.html | Set-Clipboard -AsHtml

If you create a C:\sandbox\pbcopy.ps1:

type $args[0] | Set-Clipboard -AsHtml

Then you can enable scripts and then run it from anywhere (cmd.exe, .bat files, etc):

powershell C:\sandbox\pbcopy.ps1 text.html

There are a few different Cygwin commands to copy to Windows clipboard and it looks like cygwin provides xclip, so you could probably use the Linux solution on Windows if you have cygwin.

Solution 2:

Also a Pandoc Solution

Developing on the answers here

Alternative 1

• Use :TOhtml, this will give you a new buffer with the converted html. Next, use :w ! xclip -t text/html -selection clipboard

• When I pasted this in libreoffice, it had the line numbers. I tried disabling them, and repeating. This worked nicely.

Solution using Pandoc:

• I prefer this, has a better formatting, and it is a one-liner

  :w ! pandoc -s -t html | xclip -t text/html -selection clipboard

Some explaining:

• :w ! {cmd} will pipe the buffer to {cmd} in the shell command
• pandoc -s -t html will take the input and convert to html. I think you can omit the "-t html"
• "|" works as a pipe, since it's being interpreted as a shell command
• xclip -t text/html -selection clipboard is the answer given in the link linux answer

EDIT: Trying to assign the command to a keybinding didn't work. It seems like the pipe is being used in the usual vim sense.

My workaround was to define a function:

function Html()
    let mytext = execute('w ! pandoc -s -t html | xclip -t text/html -selection clipboard')
    return mytext
endfunction

And then assigning a keybind to call this function:

nnoremap <leader>h :call Html()<cr>

Hope this helps. If anyone has a simpler solution, please comment!