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Here's my current setup:

  • Host: MacOS
  • VM: Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)
  • Hypervisor: Parallels 14
  • Host terminal emulator: iTerm2
  • Shell: Bash

I do all of my development in my Linux VM (I ssh into the VM, being terminal-only works great for me in my dev environment), and I'm a heavy user of tmux. With that being said, tmux isn't great for doing the typical mouse-drag copy/paste of text.

In the past, I've used xclip (xclip -sel c) to dump things on the clipboard. In this case, though, I'd like to dump text from my Linux VM onto the MacOS clipboard. Doing $ echo hello world | xclip -sel c gives me an error of:

Error: Can't open display: (null)

And then if I try to do something like $ echo hello world | DISPLAY=:0 xclip -sel c I get another error:

No protocol specified

Error: Can't open display: :0

Any thoughts on how to get this working? Thank you in advance!

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The way X programs work is that they look for a variable called DISPLAY, which contains the identity of the X server it should connect to, and then connect to this X server.

There is no X server running on your VM. However, MacOS can run an X server (calls XQuartz), and you can make ssh forward X connections to this server (either with ssh -X or with the configuration file, see the man pages). This will automatically set DISPLAY (check by echo $DISPLAY), and establish a "fake X server endpoint" on the VM which can be used by xclip etc.

You may have to manually start XQuartz on MacOS, I never tried X forwarding from there.

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