Re: mc-4.6.1-20060912.patch

[Thomas Dickey <dickey his com>]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Pavel Tsekov wrote:

> > That doesn't work with xterm (unless you're setting $COLORTERM in your 
> > shell).  COLORTERM won't be set by xterm because for instance it excludes 
> > dtterm and other terminals that don't do bce. You may notice that I've 
> > commented on this in more than one place. If any thought had been given to 
> > that issue, perhaps it would have some usefulness.  I seem to recall a 
> > comment that PuTTY does this also.
>
> Well it does (at least for me) as far as I can tell, but I'll check
> again tomorrow.

ok.  I may of course be missing some other aspect of the code.

> > Seeing how the use_mouse_p variable is used - saying that it works with
> > ncurses is something I'm not likely to agree with, since there are too
> > many counter-examples.  If it worked _with_ ncurses rather than trying to
>
> Like what ? screen setting term to screen.xterm ? You came to this list
> saying "it doesn't work and didn't work for the past four years" .

with xterm (just tried it).  It's not unlikely that I'm testing it the 
same way I did in 2002...

> What's wrong with the current method ? As far as I can tell mousemask() is 
> not available in X/Open curses. I can compile MC on Solaris and other systems 
> with the native curses implementation pretty easy . Btw what does mousemask()

Sure compiling with Solaris curses, you'd use just escape sequence 
processing.  Since MC contains its own code for combining clicks, it 
wouldn't care (much) about that.  It wouldn't work on the other types of 
terminal (FreeBSD console).

Actually Solaris has two implementations of curses - and I've not found 
the X/Open implementation in /usr/xpg4 to be usable.  The older version
does have some mouse support, but of course it's not documented, doesn't
work with xterm (and probably doesn't work anyway just from code rot).

> more than the MC code ? How does it detect whether the terminal
> can support xterm mouse reporting ? What do you think about this suggestion:
>
>  http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?16910

I'm reading it as suggesting the user can modify a config file to tell it 
that the terminal really does recognize xterm mouse sequences.  That's a 
reasonable idea - to a point.  ncurses tests $TERM and the terminal 
description (and won't activate its mouse-parsing if the test fails).

Beyond that, one would rely on the application parsing escape sequences 
(which seems to be the point of the chunk in main.c).  However, the code
seems to have more assumptions embedded in it (so allowing the assumptions 
to be overridden would be an improvement).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net