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mouse=a prevents the ability of copying and pasting out of vim with readable characters.

Change mouse=a to mouse=r and that should fix your issue with that.

one thing I am wondering is, are you changing the config file for your vim with the mouse set to mouse=a?

orignal answer ^

If mouse=r doesn't give you all the copy past options change it to mouse=v

Both mouse=r and mouse=v have the same functions you are needing, but depending on the vimrc you are using one will work better then the other.

For OS X users: To copy paste with mouse=a use alt instead of Shift to selec the text. Then cmd-c and cmd-v work as expected.

Found this answer here https://stackoverflow.com/a/4608387/671639 after a lot of googling.

From https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4608161/copy-text-out-of-vim-with-set-mouse-a-enabled/4608387

Press 'shift' key while selecting with the mouse. This will make mouse selection behave as if mouse=a was not enabled.

This works and has been verified by reviewers of stack-overflow who have accepted this as answer :)

Bharath's solution, pressing Shift while copying, will do it, but it will copy more than what you'd like to copy in-case of numbering or hash comments.

One way to do so even with mouse=a is use visual mode by pressing V for single cursor or Shift+V for full line highlight, and you can move up or down with arrows and use Y to copy or D to cut and that should work.

Refer: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/options.html

Look at Note section at the bottom of the reference:
When enabling the mouse, the mouse buttons can still be used by keeping the shift key pressed. This includes copy paste using mouse buttons.

*'mouse'* *E538*

'mouse'         string  (default "", "a" for GUI, MS-DOS and Win32)

            global

            {not in Vi}

    Enable the use of the mouse.  Only works for certain terminals

    (xterm, MS-DOS, Win32 |win32-mouse|, QNX pterm, *BSD console with

    sysmouse and Linux console with gpm).  For using the mouse in the

    GUI, see |gui-mouse|.

    The mouse can be enabled for different modes:

        n   Normal mode

        v   Visual mode

        i   Insert mode

        c   Command-line mode

        h   all previous modes when editing a help file

        a   all previous modes

        r   for |hit-enter| and |more-prompt| prompt

    Normally you would enable the mouse in all four modes with:

        :set mouse=a

    When the mouse is not enabled, the GUI will still use the mouse for

    modeless selection.  This doesn't move the text cursor.



    See |mouse-using|.  Also see |'clipboard'|.



    Note: When enabling the mouse in a terminal, copy/paste will use the

    "* register if there is access to an X-server.  The xterm handling of

    the mouse buttons can still be used by keeping the shift key pressed.

    Also see the 'clipboard' option.

Had the same problem: could not highlight using the mouse so could not copy and paste from VIM in a terminal session to Windows document and browser:
Did the following and it now works:

: set clipboard=unnamedplus

: set mouse=r

As for the second part of your question where in you specified that when pasting from other applications to vim it adds tabs/spaces. Try adding this to your ~/.vimrc
set paste
or in vim before pasting in normal mode
press "shift" + ":" and type "set paste"

Use these two lines below in your ~./vimrc to use all nice features of a gui-mouse and paste into system clipboard using y (yank key) if you don't really need any additional clipboard buffers:

set mouse=a

set clipboard=unnamed

You can use y to copy(yank) and p to paste even with :set mouse=a set in ~/.vimrc. Use v+arrow keys to highlight the text. To copy an entire line quickly, use shift+y.

@bgrif Changing mouse=a to mouse=v in ~/.vimrc worked for me.