By default, the clipboard gets filled only if you do visual selection (using v, or, equivalently, your mouse). (In all the following, we are talking about the "old" X clipboard, the primary buffer). To affect the clipboard using "y" even without visual selection, you need to :set clipboard=unnamed. I do not know why, in your first example, the xclip -o shows no contents; it should. I have a hypothesis about that, however, see below.

I have 10.04. I start vim.

:set clipboard

clipboard=autoselect,exclude:cons|linux

I type some random text:

asd fa sdf

asdf

Now I do ggVGy. In another terminal window, I type

xclip -o

xclip shows me, correctly, the contents of the file. I can paste it wherever with the middle mouse button, for example here:

asd fa sdf

asdf

Same if I just start visual selection with "v", move around, and yank with "y".
However, if I do "yy" (yank the current line, without visual selection), the clipboard is not updated.

OK, now I do

:set clipboard=unnamed

I do ggyy (go to the first line, yank to unnamed register without using visual selection). Now xclip -o shows "asd fa sdf" and I can paste it with my middle mouse button; the X clipboard got filled in with the yank command.

Bottom line

Without touching vimperator, it works on my system as expected. Please repeat the above (without using vimperator, see below) to make sure that when you do ggVGy, xclip -o show the contents (unlike in your example).

My hypothesis is that vimperator, for some reason, resets the X clipboard. Try to separate the regular vim session from vimperator:

1. If you select something in terminal with your mouse (left button, without Ctrl-Shift-C), can you paste it with middle button to vimperator?




2. If you visually select something with vi, can you paste it with middle mouse button in gedit (apparently you can) and see it with xclip -o (you say you can't, but I don't believe it :-); otherwise, middle mouse button would not work )?