Clipboard

Inside the VM, pbcopy and pbpaste work like on your Mac: they copy to and paste from the Mac clipboard. Every VM has them. The terminal on your Mac must support OSC 52 and allow it.

Copy and paste

VM

pbcopy < notes.txt
git diff | pbcopy
pbpaste > snippet.txt

pbcopy copies its standard input to the Mac clipboard, and pbpaste prints the Mac clipboard. Neither takes options. They are other names of lmx clipboard copy and lmx clipboard paste.

How they reach the Mac

pbcopy and pbpaste work through the terminal you opened the shell in. They send it OSC 52 escape sequences, and the terminal on your Mac writes or reads its clipboard. Inside tmux, they hand over to tmux, which passes the clipboard on through the terminal it is attached to.

Allow clipboard access in your terminal

Clipboard access is a setting of the terminal on your Mac. Allow OSC 52 in it; reading the clipboard usually needs one more permission than writing it. The terminal may ask for permission first: pbpaste waits up to 10 seconds for its answer.

TIP

When the terminal does not let the VM read the clipboard, paste with Cmd+V, the terminal's own paste shortcut.

In tmux, AstroNvim and Lazygit

Where	Copy to the Mac	Paste from the Mac
tmux	Ctrl-B, [ for copy mode; v selects, y copies	Cmd+V
AstroNvim	Yank as usual: yanks go to the Mac clipboard	Cmd+V in insert mode, or :r !pbpaste
Lazygit	Its copy commands	Cmd+V

In AstroNvim, p puts the last yank without asking the terminal, and never waits for a clipboard read. tmux turns on clipboard support for terminal types that start with xterm, such as Ghostty's xterm-ghostty; for other types, it relies on its own detection.

When it does not work

What you see	What to do
pbpaste prints nothing and says The terminal did not share its clipboard.	The terminal refused to share its clipboard, or did not answer within 10 seconds. Allow clipboard reads in its settings, or paste with Cmd+V.
pbcopy or pbpaste says it needs the terminal of a limanix shell session.	The command has no terminal to talk to. Run it in an interactive shell that you opened with limanix shell.
A copy does not reach the Mac	Check that the terminal on your Mac supports OSC 52 and allows it.