Good point! Thank you! I forgot to take full screen applications like Vim and such into account and the fact that they draw to the screen themselves instead of making the terminal to do it.
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: Feature: where terminal reports mouse click to bash, support positioning the cursor accordingly Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 14:01:42 +0800 From: Koichi Murase <myoga.mur...@gmail.com> To: IFo Hancroft <li...@ifohancroft.com> CC: bash.bug list <bug-bash@gnu.org> 2021年1月18日(月) 12:32 IFo Hancroft <li...@ifohancroft.com>: > What you want (the ability to reposition the cursor in the terminal > with a mouse click) can be done with just the terminal itself. I think Mike wanted to move the current text insertion point in Readline (or, in other words, the command line of Bash) but not just move the current cursor position in the terminal. If the terminal just moves its cursor position without sharing the information with the application (i.e., Bash in this case), the result would be just broken rendering. So, this does have something to do with Bash or any text editors working in terminals. In fact, recent versions of Emacs and Vim supports mouse using the mouse escape sequences of terminals. A terminal application (such as Bash or text editors) could receive from the terminal the mouse events encoded in terminal sequences, move its internal cursor position, render the updated text content and move the terminal cursor position by sending escape sequences to the terminal. There has been some attempt to support the mouse in zsh: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/444601/any-terminal-shell-with-mouse-support but I think this implementation is not robust. For example, I think this doesn't work when there are wide characters in the command line or the text content doesn't fit into a single terminal line. Actually, there is some practical problem of supporting mouse by shells: the shell is not a full-screen terminal application so that it cannot handle the mouse events that occurred outside the command line. So, one needs to compromise with some features or integrate something like terminal multiplexers in the shell to manage all the terminal contents in the shell. There were some discussions in Oil Shell: https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/121539-oil-dev/topic/Playing.20With.20Debuggers https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/121540-oil-discuss/topic/non-linear.20shell.20UI -- Koichi
