Are vim registers dependent on wm behavior?

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I run ubuntu and primarily use i3 as my window manager. However, whenever I use vim (not gvim) from i3, the registers seem to not function properly. For instance, none of the '*', '+' or '~' operations seem to work. However, when I switch over to GNOME, they suddenly start behaving normally. This seems very odd to me because I always assumed that DEs have no effect on command line applications. Can anyone help me figure out what is going on?

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The regular vim registers are named by letters and numbers. The * and + registers are special ones that interact with the OS clipboard. On a Linux system, that generally means the X11 clipboard and selection. If you're running vim in a terminal, and not gvim, the terminal emulator provides that interaction with X, using special escape codes. So, the most likely thing is that in changing desktop environments, you've also changed your terminal emulator or some setting inside of it.