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One register, five providers

Where a yank to `+` ends up is decided by an external command, and which command depends on WSL, Windows, Wayland or X11. The same tool also has to be asked for opposite line-ending conversions in each direction.

Neovim does not decide where "+y goes. The external commands invim.g.clipboard do, and nvim/src/lua/my/clipboard.lua picks them from the environment.

The order

WSL          → win32yank
Windows      → win32yank
Wayland      → wl-copy / wl-paste
X11          → xclip, or xsel

WSL uses win32yank because the clipboard that matters there is Windows’. Putting the text in the Linux clipboard leaves it where nothing is going to paste from: the browser and the editor it is headed for are on the Windows side.

win32yank is looked for in three places — the scoop shim, the chocolatey bin, then PATH. The scoop path needs a username, which comes fromWIN_USER or USERNAME.

Opposite conversions from the same tool

win32yank is invoked differently in each direction.

copy  = { exe, "-i", "--crlf" }
paste = { exe, "-o", "--lf" }

The Windows clipboard holds CRLF and a Neovim buffer holds LF. Convert going in, convert coming out. Do it on one side only and either the pasted lines carry a trailing ^M or the line breaks vanish in whatever Windows application receives them.

Wayland gets two attempts

Matching Wayland is not the end of it.

if os.getenv("WAYLAND_DISPLAY") or session == "wayland" then
  set_wl_clipboard()
  if vim.g.clipboard then return end
end

With wl-copy absent, vim.g.clipboard is still empty and the X11 branch runs next. xclip works under XWayland in a Wayland session, so stopping at the first match would decline something that works.

wl-copy is called with --foreground. It has to keep running to serve the selection, and by default it detaches itself into the background;--foreground keeps it the child process Neovim started, so its lifetime stays under Neovim’s control.

On X11, + maps to CLIPBOARD and * to PRIMARY. X11 has both, and PRIMARY is the one a mouse selection lands in.

Not launching it every time

Every provider carries cache_enabled = 1. Neovim remembers the last thing it yanked and stops starting an external process for each paste. Ona machine that inspects every process creation that one line is the difference you feel.