Re: Mouse support bugs and a couple of feature requests (fwd)

[Pavel Tsekov <ptsekov gmx net>]

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 4 Sep 2006 05:10:12 -0400
> From: Stephan Sokolow <ssokolow ssokolow com>
> To: Pavel Tsekov <ptsekov gmx net>
> Subject: Re: Mouse support bugs and a couple of feature requests
>
> On Monday September 4, 2006 04:41, you wrote:
> > On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, Stephan Sokolow wrote:
> > > 3. The -x option prevents gpm from working at the console.
> >
> > Why would you do that ?
>
> Because -x is the only way to get mouse support working inside my
> Yakuake-->bash-->screen-->mc stack for some reason. My more important
> complaint is that I can't get console mouse support when running MC inside
> screen and yet every other GPM-supporting app works fine.

Wait, wait... I am confused now. What do you mean by "console" ? The linux
console (virtual console) or a terminal emulator in general ?

Basically, the '-x' option should be used when you know that your terminal 
emulator is xterm-like but it doesn't set the TERM variable to "xterm" 
i.e. as a hint to MC that it should expect xterm features. One of these
features is the xterm mouse reporting - it has nothing to do with gpm. 
xterm like terminals (when instructed to do so) generate special escape
sequences which indicate that a mouse event occured. MC reads these 
sequences (via its standard input stream) and interprets them when it 
thinks that it is runnning under xterm-like terminal emulator. This is 
different from gpm mouse event reporting - in this case MC must be linked 
to the gpm client library to read mouse events. gpm mouse reporting as
used by MC is useful only when running MC on the linux virtual console 
(linux console).

I've tried to run MC under yakuake and the mouse works as expected.
If it doesn't work for you it is most likely because the TERM variable
is set to something different from "xterm". This is why you have to
pass the -x option to MC.