The Problem

You yank text in Neovim over SSH, switch to your local machine, and paste — nothing. The clipboard is empty.

Neovim (0.10+) has built-in clipboard support via the yank autocommand, so in a local session everything works fine. But LazyVim overrides this with a conditional in its default options:

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opt.clipboard = vim.env.SSH_TTY and "" or "unnamedplus"

This checks whether the SSH_TTY environment variable is set. If it is (i.e., you’re in an SSH session), LazyVim sets clipboard to an empty string, effectively disabling system clipboard sync. The rationale is that clipboard forwarding over SSH is unreliable in many setups, so LazyVim plays it safe.

The Fix

Override this default in ~/.config/nvim/lua/config/options.lua:

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vim.opt.clipboard = "unnamedplus"

This forces Neovim to always sync yanked text to the system clipboard, regardless of whether you’re in an SSH session.

Making It Actually Work over SSH

Setting clipboard = "unnamedplus" alone isn’t enough — you also need a working clipboard forwarding mechanism between the remote and local machine. Common approaches:

  • OSC 52 — Modern terminals (kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty, Windows Terminal) support the OSC 52 escape sequence, which lets the remote terminal write directly to the local clipboard. Neovim 0.10+ detects and uses this automatically.
  • X11 forwarding — ssh -X or ssh -Y forwards the X clipboard. Requires xclip or xsel on the remote.
  • Dedicated tools — lemonade, clipper, etc.

For most modern setups, OSC 52 is the simplest — it just works with no extra configuration if your terminal supports it.