[screen-devel] scrollback feature request

[Michael Grant]

I'd like an easier way to access the scrollback (copy) buffer with the
mouse.

Many terminal windows support vt220 mouse codes which include
pointing, clicking, and scrolling with the scroll wheel.

I'd like to see Screen use this feature to allow easy access to the
copy buffer.

The terminal window has 2 basic modes (appoligies I don't know the
exact terminology here): 1) at the prompt which scrolls stuff off the
top of the screen into the copy buffer and 2) full screen mode in an
editor like vi or emacs.  I am interested in the first mode where
things scroll off the top of the screen into the buffer.

Here's my vision:

When the terminal is in the first mode and lines scroll off the top of
the screen into the buffer, using the mouse wheel upward should put
you into the scrollback mode.  Scrolling down exits scrollback mode
when you are at the bottom of the screen.

Secondly, and this would be really cool, a CUI based scrollbar which
you could click and drag with the mouse the scroll around in the
scrollback buffer.  I'm imagining a one or perhaps 2 character wide
region on the left or right of the window, the scroller could be made
of simple inverse block characters or maybe something in unicode.  On
a technical level, I do know that it is possible to get mouse clicks
by putting the terminal in vt220 mode so this all is technically
possible.

Copy and paste would also need to work such that you could copy and
paste large areas of text. For example today, in PuTTY, this works
because you can select the text and it goes into the copy-paste buffer
of the local computer.  That needs to continue to work but also work
with Screen's own copy-pasting.  I think this is possible and I just
saw a message a few days ago here where someone posted the escape
codes to put stuff into the local computer's paste buffer!

Some CUI based programs put the terminal into the second mode (full
screen) and use these vt220 mouse codes, notably vi/vim and emacs.
When this happens, Screen would need to relinquish the mouse to these
programs.  I know this does happen when you edit something, it's no
longer possible to scroll the terminal window with the mouse wheel
alone (it requires shift-scroll).  This needs to continue to work.

On a technical level, all of this should be possible.  I looked
briefly at the Screen source to see if I could help do this but
unfortunately I couldn't follow it.  Perhaps I can help move this
forward in some way?

This feature is something I've long wanted in Screen!

Michael Grant

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