That requires that vim be compiled with the xterm-clipboard feature enabled. On my Fedora 24 desktop, vim doesn't have it enabled, but gvim does (according to

That requires that vim be compiled with the xterm-clipboard feature enabled. On my Fedora 24 desktop, vim doesn't have it enabled, but gvim does (according to the output of the :version command). One advantage of the method you describe is that it can be limited to just part of a line. Piping output to xclip is limited to complete lines of text due to the nature of :w !.