GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 160134
mouse events occurring past column 95 are not passed through to terminal application
Last modified: 2006-04-20 11:01:48 UTC
Open a gnome-terminal with more than 95 columns. Open vim (I have 6.2.98) on a file with lines longer than 95 characters. In vim, set the options: :set mouse=a :set nowrap Click and drag to visually select some text. If you drag past column 95, the mouse movement is ignored, until you drag back to the left of column 95. If you start the click-and-drag after column 95, it is completely ignored. This occurs at column 95 with both smaller and larger fonts. In an xterm (version 179), this does not occur.
Created attachment 34378 [details] A text file that can be used to recreate the bug.
I can reproduce this with vim, but not with pico, which hints that this may be NOTGNOME. Maybe you can look into vim's source and see what it is doing when it's handling mouse events?
I do not have pico, but I can reproduce it with lynx (a text-based browser, version 2.8.5) using the text file that I attached: > lynx -use_mouse dimensions.txt The middle mouse button brings up a text menu in lynx, but not after column 95. Also, if the text menu straddles column 95, then clicking a menu item on or before column 95 works, but clicking after column 95 does not work. The bug does not occur using xterm (v 179) or KDE's konsole (from KDE 3.1). So I have: gnome-terminal xterm konsole vim BUG OK OK lynx BUG OK OK
This is due to the fact that everything vte sends to the child is recoded from UTF-8 to the encoding the child expects, and column numbers for mouse events are encoded in a char (after adding 32). Now 95+32=127, so anything after column 95 ends up being a byte which is not proper UTF-8, and vte just drops the whole string. One simple fix might be add a boolean parameter to vte_terminal_feed_child which controls whether recoding will take place, and use it to mark the string sent by vte_terminal_send_mouse_button_internal as not recodable. It's be smarter to have a different function to do this, I guess. ¡Yay for a protocol that breaks for > 255 columns! Moving to vte, where this will happen.
¡Yay for a protocol that breaks for > 223 (255-32) columns! :) Actually, xterm is also buggy in case a non-UTF-8 locale with "*locale: true" is used, in this case xterm uses a standalone child process (luit) to convert the whole stream...
*** Bug 317663 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Can't we encode it as valid UTF8? like gunichar->utf8 conversion.
No, I don't think so. Applications wouldn't recognize it.
IMHO the best would be to create some new escape sequence for mouse clicks that - is valid utf-8 (the best is if it's 7-bit clean) - supports arbitrary terminal size and then include support for it in ncurses/slang and the well-known terminals, and slowly migrate from this old brain-damaged escape sequence to the new scheme. If anybody knows the proper forum where such things can be requested and discussed, please tell me. :)
Try: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
Created attachment 63776 [details] [review] Patch to allow mouse to be used on terminals with more than 95 columns This patch changes the mouse code to send protocol data as binary rather than UTF-8, so that the range isn't limited to 95 columns.
I tested it with vte-0.12.0 in both UTF-8 and iso8859-2 mode, and it seems to be fine. Thanks!
Sean: Haven't tested yet, but your patch is really appreciated!!
Thanks. Committed after making it a public function and renaming to vte_terminal_feed_child_binary, and updating docs and Python bindings. 2006-04-20 Behdad Esfahbod <behdad@gnome.org> * doc/reference/tmpl/internals.sgml: * doc/reference/tmpl/reaper.sgml: * doc/reference/tmpl/vte-unused.sgml: * doc/reference/tmpl/vte.sgml: * doc/reference/tmpl/vteaccess.sgml: * doc/reference/vte-sections.txt: Misc fixes and updates. * python/vte.defs: * python/vte.override: Updates. Bug 160134 – mouse events occurring past column 95 are not passed through to terminal application Based on patch from Sean Estabrooks. * src/vte.h: * src/vte.c (vte_terminal_feed_child_binary): New public function. * src/vte.c (vte_terminal_send_mouse_button_internal), (vte_terminal_maybe_send_mouse_drag): Use feed_child_binary.