I’m using Ubuntu and terminal vim and I have this workflow that I would yank something in Vim, suspend it (ctrl+z) and then paste the yanked text on command line usually to do a search with ack. For some reason when I suspend Vim, X Window clipboard gets empty and it will paste nothing. Here is a small vim function that will fix that by using xsel.

" work-around to copy selected text to system clipboard
" and prevent it from clearing clipboard when using ctrl+z (depends on xsel)
function! CopyText()
  normal gv"+y
  :call system('xsel -ib', getreg('+'))
endfunction
vmap <leader>y :call CopyText()

I have mapped **y**  to call the CopyText function. If you read the function, **gv**  is used to highlight whatever you had previously selected and it will then be yanked into **+** register with **"+y**. This function depends on xsel that you can install with:

sudo apt-get install xsel

Also, don’t forget to set clipboard in Vim to unnamedplus (works only in version 7.3.74 and higher). With this setting Vim will use X11 clipboard for yank and paste (easy to copy/paste from/to Vim).

" use X11 clipboard for yank and paste
set clipboard=unnamedplus

Other solution to this problem would be to just use a clipboard manager (if you want to depend on a GUI tool). I’ve tried clipit and it works. You can install it with:

sudo apt-get install clipit

If you are interested into more Vim stuff, checkout my vimfiles on Github.