I've been googling around trying to figure out if it's possible to use my mouse wheel to scroll while inside Vim in Mac's Terminal, with no luck. It seems as if only X11 or iTerm support this.
Before I give up, I thought I'd try the geniuses here to see if anyone knows a way to do this. So, does anyone know if I can set that up?
Or should I seriously consider using a different terminal application?
And if you're using iTerm, add this to your vimrc
:set mouse=a
http://bitheap.org/mouseterm/
Use MouseTerm (and do make sure to install SIMBL first!) and scrolling will work like a charm, even remote, using Mac Terminal.
You need to fully quit the Terminal application (Command+Q) and then launch it again after installing MouseTerm.
This is an old question, but a top hit on google, so I feel compelled to provide an updated answer.
Running OSX El Capitan 10.11, vim mouse and trackpad scrolling just worked(TM) for me in Terminal.app by default. However occasionally the mouse/trackpad input stopped manipulating the vim buffer, and started scrolling the terminal buffer. The answer was Command+R or Menu View --> Allow Mouse Reporting. Turning that on allowed the mouse/trackpad scroll operations to move the cursor in vim.
Termanal Menu > View > Allow Mouse Reporting
Terminal Menu > Preferences >
Keyboard > Scroll alternate screen
If the mouse functionalities still do not work properly take a look at my answer in this post How to let vim behave on Mac OS X as on Ubuntu?, just add to your .vimrc
set ttymouse=xterm2
You can read this article, but I'm pretty sure since the default terminal in Mac OS X has a built-in scrollbar, the mousewheel commands automatically go to it. You could definitely use gVim as suggested in the previous answer. I find that I don't generally want to use the mouse in Vim though as it takes my hands off the keyboard.
I just use 50j to go down and 50k to go up. Not exactly scrolling, but it works pretty well.
Make sure the terminal is xterm & not ansi in Terminal Menu > Preferences > Profiles > Advanced. I accidentally broke scrolling by changing the term type in a naive effort to get coloring to work over ssh.
Use gVim, which gives you a text editing environment in a window you can scroll. Terminal is not involved when using gVim.
I'm using xterm in X11 (XQuartz 2.3.4) and vim works very fine with mouse and also suport 256 colors.
Here is the ~/.Xresources I use to make my xterm nicer in X11:
XTerm*faceName: Lucida Sans Typewriter Regular
XTerm*faceSize: 9
XTerm*utf8: 1
xterm*saveLines: 1000
xterm*jumpScroll: true
!xterm*awaitInput: true
!xterm*multiScroll: true
XTerm*scrollBar: false
xterm*scrollbar*thickness: 16
xterm*rightScrollBar: true
XTerm*foreground: white
XTerm*background: grey10
!XTerm*background: black
XTerm*cursorColor: yellow
xterm*visualBell: false
xterm*loginShell: true
Little tips, to remove the bell sound in X11's xterm type this command:
xset b 0
I would recommend using iTerm - it has so many advantages over Terminal eg Mouse support, 256 colors, sensible copy and paste (auto-copy, word/url selection with double click, middle click paste)...
When using iTerm create a .vimrc file (if not already there) in your home folder and add the line:
:set mouse=a
Scrolling down in vim to view a file works after this.
Related
I'm using bash on ubuntu on windows 10 and would like to enable scrolling using the mouse wheel in vi or vim. I've tried entering the following command in vim and added it to the .vimrc file and /usr/share/vim/vim74/debian.vim
set mouse=a
However I still can't scroll with the mouse.
I added this to my /etc/vim/vimrc.local, and it worked:
set mouse=a
map <ScrollWheelUp> <C-Y>
map <ScrollWheelDown> <C-E>
Quick and simple answer:
If you use mintty/wsltty it works just fine!
You have done, properly, all you can in vim and the problem is with your terminal emulator.
Mouse wheel scrolling through the scrollback buffer of a terminal emulator is a function of the terminal emulator which is consuming the mouse events. You are wanting to send these events to the application (vim) hooked to the terminal.
Most terminal emulators have a way to enable the passthrough of mouse events when in "Application Key Mode" or "Alternate Screen". Most also support using a modifier key (like holding ALT) that will passthrough the mouse events as you wish.
Your version of Vim may not have been compiled with mouse support. See if you can get gvim. It contains a graphical version of Vim. Depending on your distribution it may also contain the terminal vim with almost all features enabled, including mouse support.
To check for mouse support in Vim, enter :version and check whether +mouse is in the list of features.
Under Preferences -> 'Keys' It is possible to tick Show/hide iTerm2 with a system-wide hotkey.
However iTerm always appears on the main display (monitor) instead of where the cursor currently resides.
e.g. if I have three monitors, and am working on the third screen, the hotkey makes iTerm appear on first monitor, instead of where I am currently working.
Any advice how to solve this please?
UPDATE:
The bug strikes back again in v.3.1.6. If any workarounds are known, please share.
I'm on Sierra using iTerm 3.1 and I have the option under window to put the screen where the cursor is (bottom right drop down options). I'm using it with a hotkey.
The answer by Grant works.
The only thing you need to do is to install the beta version since there was a bug in the stable version.
This bug was fixed in 3.1.beta.1 https://iterm2.com/downloads.html
Here's the link to the latest beta version https://iterm2.com/downloads/beta/iTerm2-3_1_beta_4.zip
This may be a couple more keystrokes than you were hoping for, but if you install window management software like Size Up, you can get this working with just a few keystrokes.
Maintain your ⌥Space hotkey preference on Iterm2. Go to Size Up -> Preferences and change 'Send Window Prev Monitor' to an easy keystroke. I used ⌥1.
Now, you can do ⌥Space to get the terminal open and ⌥1 one or two times to get it to your monitor of choice. It takes a couple of key combos, but not too many!
I had this problem with macos monterey and iterm 3.4.15. I'm using the hotkey to show the terminal with slide-out window. After some search on the internet I found that disabling the option on system preferences to reopen closed documents solved the issue and the hotkey is now opening terminal on the screen with cursor as it should.
mac -> System preferences -> General -> (deselect this) Close windows when quitting an app
Neither of the above worked for me, but this helped, even though the question was quite different in that thread.
iTerm2:
Mouse reporting works out of the box, works in Vim, works fully in Tmux, mouse wheel reporting works in Vim and for navigating Tmux history, but mouse wheel reporting does not work in manpages, does not work in git log, does not work in less
Terminal.app:
Mouse reporting does not work out of the box, but once installed mouse wheel reporting works everywhere including less and manpages and git log, etc. However mouse click+drag fails in Tmux, but still works in Vim.
So I'd rather use just one of these terminal apps, and I am particularly digging the immense feature set of iTerm2 (e.g. mouse-over to select which term to input to beats the hell out of anything Tmux can offer since it is zero keys to switch contexts) so I'd prefer if I can get mouse wheel reporting working fully in those programs.
I am having a hard time trying to debug the terminal codes being sent because the only way I can intercept them is through Vim, (as ctrl+V followed by scroll in my terminal will just have it scroll the terminal buffer) but Vim seems to be doing everything correctly.
Update: According to mouseterm project, it seems to be using a feature called "Simulated mouse wheel scrolling" to scroll programs like less... maybe I can configure iTerm to do the same. Somehow. I do believe PuTTY also accomplishes this, and I'd like to have at least the functionality I can get on Windows on the Mac... Nope, I'm just spoiled by the neatness of MouseTerm.
Although less (which is also used in git log) does not use mouse reporting itself,
iTerm2 can be configured to send up/down-arrow escape codes for scrolling
(from mouse wheel or trackpad two-finger swipe)
and less understands those.
See my answer
to a related question about how to set this up for iTerm2.
less does not actually recognize any terminal mouse events. (As such, tools that use it, like man and git log will not recognize mouse events either.) Something else you've done must be making it appear to support mouse events.
If you want the mouse wheel to work in your pager, you'll need to find a pager other than less which supports it. You might be able to put something together using view (vim in read-only mode), but applications like man which output content with control codes will be an issue there.
I've found these two articles
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/vimfaq2html3.pl
(see 31.13)
and
http://www.tummy.com/journals/entries/jafo_20060727_145450
But am unfamiliar with basic vim setup. Can anyone help me with a step by step instructions to making mouse usuage in command line mode automatically enabled? (and you will have good luck for a week if you can shed some light on enabling paste from OS to terminal window in VIM)
Note: Using latest mac os
To enable mouse support in all modes put this in ~/.vimrc:
set mouse=a
Note that Terminal.app has no mouse support, you'll need to use xterm in X11 to get mouse working.
I did find a 'plugin' for Terminal that claims to add mouse support, however it is in alpha and has no mention of 10.6. If it does work at all you'd probably need to run Terminal.app in 32 bit mode.
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/MouseTerm.shtml
Try starting vim like this:
screen vim
That should enable copy/paste with the mouse.
You might also want to set-up an alias in ~/.bashrc for this.
Just use iTerm2 instead of the default Terminal.app. It has lots of other features, but mouse support alone makes it worth the switch.
The post summarizes problems in using Screen in Mac's terminal when you have the following in your .zshrc
if [[ $STY = '' ]] then screen -xR; fi
Solution #1 is not working but Solution #2 works: Clipboard programs: pbcopy, pbpaste and xsel do not work at all
Bug in Vim when used in Mac: Unable to have no scattered windows in Screen by .Xresources.
Solved: Ctrl A stops working in terminal. This suggests me that Screen's keyboard bindings need to be changed slightly.
Solved: The scrolling with touchpad does not work. By editing your .screenrc the scrollback works normally (including touchpad)
Solved: Unable to have Dvorak keybindings for Screen for moving in Scrollback mod.
How can you use pbcopy/pbpaste/xsel inside Screen?
In screenrc:
# Make xterm scrolling work properly with screen.
termcapinfo xterm-256color|xterm-color|xterm|xterms|xs|rxvt ti#:te#
Works for Terminal.app too.
I usually solve the ctrl-a problem by setting my escape character to ctrl-z (which you generally don't need to use as often when you're running screen, since instead of backgrounding a process, you can just start up a new screen). In my .screenrc:
escape ^Zz
Scrolling using the touchpad just isn't going to work; screen is acting as a terminal emulator inside a terminal emulator, and it's just not possible for screen to switch the scrollback buffer in Terminal.app whenever you switch between screens. You're going to have to use screen's scrollback features. See this article for some tips on using screen's scrollback features.
The default OS X Terminal app is weak. Get iTerm instead:
iTerm
If I'm not mistaken, iTerm solves all of these out of the box (my install is a couple years old, so I can't test that theory now).
Problem #3 might be solvable if you enable the alternate screen buffer. Use altscreen on in .screenrc
Solution #1 which does not work
To be able to copy/paste in OSX put the following to your .screenrc
bind b eval "writebuf" "exec sh -c 'pbcopy < /tmp/screen-exchange'"
> Th[e] line - - sends that file to pbcopy - -.
The command is bound to C-a b (in my case, C-z b).
Solution #2 which works but is rather slow to type
Use Scrollback mode i.e. copy mode by
Coping
C-A [
Pasting
C-A ]
The solution is great, since it is the same in all terminal apps. It is similar to the clipboard as you use with your mouse.
Q5: Impossible: The scrolling with
touchpad does not work.
You can use ^A Esc to scroll up the screen. You cannot use Touchpad in Screen.
This solves the scrollback issue, although it is somewhat broken in that it isn't aware of screen's buffers.
env TERM=vt100 screen