@burrows - thank you for this ! Copy paste has been so much a pain that it is the single biggest reason for me to consider a Mac. I am envious of the mac people who copy paste effortlessly from a gvim session on to a remote tmux vim session.
It's all about the programs you use, really. Vim does support x selection buffers, and gvim should automatically take advantage of these (gvim --version should return +clipboard). In fedora (at least), the console vim with X support is called vimx (really wish it would replace the normal vim binary). With this I can just highlight and middle click to interact with the selection buffer. (I can even middle click in command mode without entering insert mode).
Now nearly all terminals have a clipboard handler (eg. for Gnome Terminal, ctrl+shift+v), but naturally this just blindly types the text. Does this mac person have the ability to do anything more than this? Maybe with X forwarding you could get a remove vim session with clipboard handlers to directly work with your clipboard.
The real problem is none of this is automatic, but the mac guy would need to go through most of these hoops as well, for the tools specified.
In OS X's Terminal application, copy/paste works universally. There is no tweaking for specific tools or programs. CMD+C and CMD+V work at all times. Everywhere. CMD+X for cut is a different manner.
My question was, in this scenario, is it simply inserting those characters into the buffer as if you were typing them, or was the remote program aware it was a copy and paste. This of course does depend on the programs used both on the end, and in the chain.
If it's the latter, then most linux setups wouldn't need any configuration if you used the terminal's inbuilt copy paste.
This is such a fundamentally good idea to implement, thanks to Aaron for taking the time with this - a universal copy/paste is like having access to manual pipes for the GUI, priceless!
I have used Parcellite in the past, but recently I've found copyq, a much more complete clipboard manager. But, as you said, if it not for the clipboard manager, I would certainly embrace the solution posted here.
