Re: Two little features (and a bounty?)

[Micah Cowan]

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(My Thunderbird screws up the quoting, yours appear "deeper" than mine.)

Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Micah Cowan wrote:
> 
> Perhaps he's referring to the fact that it won't work until the
> application requests mouse tracking, and several applications don't
> request mouse tracking from screen.
> 
>> Is there a way to trace if this is happening?  I've given you the
>> applications I use.  Micah, I've been a user and advocate of wget for
>> many years.  If you would like a shell, please let me know.

Well, if you activate logging in the screen window, you can check for
the presence of the "send mouse codes" request sequence. It'll be one of
\E9h, \E1000h, or \E1001h.

> If that's the case, there's really nothing we can do until terminfo
> supports a way of advertising DEC/xterm mouse capabilities (kmous
> doesn't really cut it).
> 
>> ..if (windowtitle =~ /^nano/) { set sendmouseevents = 1; } would suffice
>> just fine.  Or just give us an option to toggle mouse events on or off
>> by default.  Or a ctrl-a :mouseon! My xterm doesn't know what on the
>> other end of an SSH session is requesting or not, it just happily sends
>> the click events down the pipe.  Aware applications use them.  Unaware
>> apps discard them.

That's unlikely to be true. The applications on the other end of the SSH
tunnel requested the click events, first (based on the TERM env var
having something like "xterm" in it: they check for that value
explicitly, but usually don't recognize "screen" as a mouse-capable term
name). Try running your ssh session under script, and check for the
\E1001h, etc, sequences, in the resulting typescript.

You've mentioned Nano, but that actually works for me (it uses ncurses,
which assumes decent mouse support if kmous is advertised, which screen
does), so long as mouse support has been enabled ("nano -m" or typing
M-m). I know that Vim and some other apps do an explicit check for the
value of TERM, though, which is why they can't be resolved without
configuration adjustments.

Blanket sending of mouse codes without them being requested is bad
behavior, and would result in spewing codes to the screen in some cases
(say, when you suspend nano to work in your shell). The application has
to be expecting them.

> I'd need more info on the printing stuff, as I never use it. I assume
> we're talking about the Print Window / Redirect to Printer feature Xterm
> has, that's tracked at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?17310. I don't
> know enough to even know whether it's even practical to "fix" screen for
> use with that, but a monetary incentive for fixing it would at least
> motivate me to dig in a bit more (TBH, without that incentive it drops
> to the bottom of my to-do list: not enough demand AFAICT).
> 
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg01387.html

Hm, that doesn't look unachievable. :)

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer,
and GNU Wget Project Maintainer.
http://micah.cowan.name/
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