I've been using gnu-screen now for many years. I use it through PuTTY almost exclusively. On the Linux/Unix side, I'm in the shell, emacs, and vi. When I'm in emacs (and vi as well), I have it set so that the mouse wheel scrolls the emacs buffer. Similar in vi.
I thought I saw a mode in Screen which the mousewheel controlled scrolling Screen's scrollback buffer in scrollback mode. Or maybe I'm misremembering and maybe it was tmux? If this works in Screen, could someone please tell me how to turn that on? This got me thinking about an easier way to use the scrollback buffer with the mouse. I'd like to be able to enter scrollback mode simply by scrolling up the mousewheel at the shell prompt. I'd like to be able to select text using the left mouse button and paste it in with the right mouse button (like PuTTY in fact). This would need to happen within screen because at PuTTY's scroll buffer gets pretty messed up if you are trying to select/copy/paste more than a screenfull and you've changed screens. I know you can do this using the keyboard, what I'm after is the convenience of being able to do this with the mouse as well. Emacs and vi can set the terminal in the mouse tracking mode (esc-[1000h) and get the mouse reporting and Screen is aware which screens are in that mode so it seems technically possible. Next, I'd love to have scroll bars to scroll back up into Screen's scrollback buffer. Character based using say white and black spaces would be fine. Click on the elevator and you should be able to drag around Screen's scrollback buffer. I'm imaginging a Screen scrollbar on the right (or left) which was not part of the tty. If there are multiple screens on the screen (split screen), all get their own scrollbars. I know PuTTY has it's own scrollback buffer but it gets pretty messed up if you switch screens and it's empty if you log back in and reattach. I'm really looking for a mousey way to get at Screen's scrollback region which acts more or less like PuTTY in a single window. One thing which this would break would be copying text from PuTTY into another application such as another PuTTY window. I don't know of any escape sequence that would tell PuTTY to fill or return the paste buffer from the machine. And frankly being able to randomly pull the machine's paste buffer is a security hazard. Even being able to send something to the past buffer would be a security hazard--think of the possibilities of something mean sending "rm -r *\n" to the paste buffer randomly! I think PuTTY mitigates this sort of thing now by displaying what you just pasted in inverted color text so you can stop the paste before it gets pasted. Regardless, being able to control the application's paste buffer would require a change to the terminal program (PuTTY in my case). This is unlikely to happen and frankly not necessary. In PuTTY (nothing to do with Screen), one can shift-drag to select text on the screen and fill the local machine's paste buffer. shift-right click pastes back. This allows you to copy-paste stuff that's on the visible window. But what if you needed to copy something that had scrolled off the screen (that was only intact in Screen's scrollback buffer)? There is a way... What you can do is always push lines off the top of the screen into PuTTY's scrollback buffer. It is also possible to replay Screen's scrollback buffer into PuTTY's scrollback buffer, I have written a hack to do this which I bind to C-a C-l. Shift-scroll or would allow you to shift-click/drag and copy a large amount of text like you can do today. This is possible today when emacs captures the mouse, you can shift-scroll and scroll PuTTY's window and shift-select/copy stuff just fine. A little care would have to be taken when screens have a modeline at the bottom and switching screens. A screen command to replay a screen off into the PuTTY's (or any terminal window's) scrollback buffer would allow someone to shift-scroll up to it if needed. To be clear, scrolling back up into Screen's scrollback buffer should work when other applications haven't taken the mouse, as in emacs or vi. Once you are in emacs or vi, the mouse clicks go to those programs and Screen would leave them alone. If you're using an editor like this in a screen, it wouldn't make any sense to go back into Screen's scrollback buffer anyway. In summary, I think what would need to be implemented: 1) scroll wheel automatically enters screen scrollback mode, this implies that the terminal is in esc[1000h mode. 2) select with mouse drag and paste with right-click from screen's buffer similar to PuTTY or at least with some options to be able to act like PuTTY's mouse buttons. 3) extra care taken when things scroll off the screen to create consistent scrollback buffer for programs such as PuTTY or other terminals that have scrollback buffers and a built-in way to replay a screens scrollback buffer into the window. 4) virtual scrollbars around screens which are clickable and dragable. (1) may already be implemented unless it's tmux I'm recalling that had that feature. Even if without virtual scrollbars (i guess that could be hard), 1-3 above would be really useful to have. Hoping this is some food for thought! I'm hoping Screen development isn't dead and it's still possible to make this great utlilty better! Michael Grant
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