RFE: make non-x11 emacs mouse-aware

[Ken Brown]

On 10/1/2012 4:29 PM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
> On 01/10/2012 3:20 PM, Ken Brown wrote:
>> On 10/1/2012 2:49 PM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
>>> Hi all, esp. emacs maintainer(s),
>>>
>>> I'd like to request that the non-x11 emacs be made mouse aware. Right
>>> now, terminal mouse mode is broken in normal emacs because the emacs
>>> core doesn't recognize the resulting mouse events. You can use emacs-x11
>>> in terminal mode as a heavyweight workaround, but it turns out that
>>> mouse awareness is controlled by the src/config.h file created by
>>> ./configure:
>>>> /* Define if you have mouse support. */
>>>> /* #undef HAVE_MOUSE */
>>>
>>> There doesn't seem to be an explicit configure switch for it (it's
>>> enabled indirectly by --with-x11 or --with-ns), but editing directly
>>> produced the desired results on a headless linux machine, with no
>>> undesirable side effects so far. I see no reason it shouldn't also work
>>> under cygwin.
>>
>> I'd be happy to do it if I could be sure there were no bad side
>> effects.  But I never use emacs-nox, so it isn't easy for me to test
>> it on a long-term basis.  Maybe you should build it yourself and
>> report back.
> As noted, I have tested on a headless linux machine, with no problems so
> far (several days). There seems to be a clean division between the
> window management and the mouse handling code. This makes sense, because
> the mouse events themselves are handled by keymaps and such, in elisp
> land, while the generation of those events is deeper and varies
> depending on their source (X11, NS, terminal).
>
> If you worry that cygwin might behave differently than linux, I could
> build emacs locally and test as well, but I don't expect any difference.
>
>> And can you be more specific about what you expect emacs to do with
>> mouse events when it's running in a terminal?  I thought mintty
>> captured mouse events.  In particular, when I run emacs-x11 under
>> mintty, C-h k <mouse-click> produces no response; the cursor stays in
>> the minibuffer, and emacs continues to wait for me to press a key.
>> Running under X, however, emacs does see the mouse click in that same
>> situation.  For another example, if I run emacs-x11 under mintty, I
>> can highlight text with the mouse and then paste it with
>> shift-insert.  But again it's mintty doing the work, not emacs.
> On any emacs, xterm-mouse-mode puts the terminal in mouse-reporting mode
> and starts watching stdin for the xterm mouse escape sequences: left,
> right, scroll, modifier keys, anything the terminal makes available
> (most xterm-like terminals intercept shift + mouse, for example). You
> can peek in xt-mouse.el to see how mouse escapes are turned into
> appropriate mouse events, but that's not really important here. The
> issue is that emacs-nox doesn't know what to do with '<mouse-1>' etc
> that it suddenly starts receiving. I suppose you could manually wire up
> all the various events by hand, but on emacs-x11 they're already there
> (even in terminal mode) and terminal-generated mouse events work out of
> the box.

I didn't know about xterm-mouse-mode.

OK, I've built emacs-nox with mouse support, and it works, as far as I 
can tell.  I'll upload it as a test release after I've tested it a 
little more.

Ken


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