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Comment on Tmux, for fun and profit

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I've used tmux and screen on occasion, but I can't get past the fact that they don't fit well with GUI terminals. I love having "GUI" scroll-back, which I can go through with mouse scroll-wheel, or just dragging the scroll bar up and down.

You could enable the mouse for mouse interaction with a supported terminal. In my tmux config:

  set -g mode-mouse on
  setw -g mouse-select-window on
  setw -g mouse-select-pane on
This particular configuration will allow you to scroll, select text and focus windows and panes with just a mouse click.

Except you can't natively select text for copy/paste anymore.

When you click-drag you're now triggering a tmux selection, not the native terminal-emulator highlight. This is a big problem because the emulated variant is slow and behaves nothing like the real thing.

To my understanding this is also a problem that can't be solved without further terminal emulator support. As it stands the remote application (tmux) can either receive all mouse-events or none of them.

This means you have to choose between scroll-wheel support plus broken text-selection - or no scroll-wheel support.

I tried the mouse integration and turned it back off for the same reason as you. Not having copy-paste at the terminal level is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. Learning the vim movement commands better eliminated most needs for the mouse-pointing ability anyway.

Same here. But I found a decent workaround.

I have following in my .tmux.conf:

   set -g history-limit 1000
   # See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Tmux#Scrolling_issues
   set -g terminal-overrides 'xterm*:smcup@:rmcup@'
Now I can scroll using "scroll bar" which is acceptable for me. Plus I also get native text-selection.

Learning the vim movement commands better eliminated most needs for the mouse-pointing ability anyway.

Sadly not for me. I'm a die-hard vim-user but I can't live without my scroll-wheel in the terminal.

Agreed. This comment has a solution (if you use Mac OS X and iTerm2): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3823013

Agreed, it's a bit cumbersome scrolling and copy-pasting. It is nice to be able to scroll your panes independently though.

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