Bug#921537: gnome-terminal: mouse wheel scrolling sends 6 key up / key down escape sequences (kcuu1 / kcud1) in alternate screen

[Egmont Koblinger]

Hi,

> But this one is really special as specific to GNOME Terminal.

No, not at all. At least I get this behavior in xterm and konsole, too.

> Well, for applications that do not have any support, it is easy
> to write a wrapper script that does the limited work. Thus the
> user could choose whether to enable the wheel or not.

Just as much as you can disable now, by writing wrapper scripts. Or
just a one-off disabling in your shell startup files.

It's unclear to me who would go through apps and decide which ones to
turn on this feature, and how it would actually be implemented, e.g.
would some distributions ship wrappers by default to hundreds of apps
where scrolling is potentially useful? Because if it's up for
individual users to come up with wrapper scripts for themselves to
enable, it would probably be used by so few people that it would not
be worth it to have this feature at all.

> it has recently been implemented in "less" (not yet released)

Which means "less" will enable mouse reporting, that is, you will no
longer get synthesized keypresses for scrolling.

> And because it has too much drawback in general and its could be
> best used with wrapper scripts (i.e. only when it can make sense),
> it should be disabled by default.

That's your opinion on a design dilemma with IMO no clear single answer.

> No, it came from GNOME Terminal. In xterm's log:

I recalled it incorrectly, then. (I'm still not sure, there was quite
some confusion, maybe the feature appeared in gnome-terminal without a
way to turn it off, and the escape sequence was then introduced by
xterm? I can't remember. Whatever.)

> The fact that this user wants only wheel support may be a very specific
> choice, and he didn't complain that this hack wasn't enabled by default
> in xterm.

I've seen a lot of people looking for mouse wheel support in "less" on
various forums, having seen it already e.g. in gnome-terminal,
wondering where it disappeared. I didn't see people complaining about
the existence of this feature, apart from you.


cheers,
egmont