Middle-button paste from vim to R

Question

In vim, I use the indentLine plugin and set list listchars=tab:\ \ ,trail:. is activated in my vimrc, so that vim displays begin-of-line spaces as pipes "|" and end-of-line spaces as dots.
When mouse-selecting in vim and pasting into the R console (using middle click), these "special characters" are included in the R console, leading to errors.
Is there a way to select-middle-click-paste only the content rather than all the characters displayed in vim?
(note: This is under an up-to-date ubuntu linux)

Answer 1

When the terminal (not Vim) performs the selection, it captures all visible screen characters (so :set number would cause such problems, too).

The solution is to let Vim yank the buffer contents. If you have a visual selection, that can be done via "*y, or :[range]yank *. The * is the mouse selection register; there's also the clipboard register +, cp. :help quotestar.

To keep using the mouse for selection, you have to change the 'mouse' option, e.g.:

:set mouse=a

Note that all of this depends on proper clipboard support in Vim, and mouse support in the terminal.