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No more no surprises

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Debian Vim Sysadmin Planet Debian
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

Debian has generally always had, as a rule, “sane defaults” and “no surprises”. This was completely shattered for me when Vim decided to hijack the mouse from my terminal and break all copy/paste functionality. This has occured since the release of Debian 9.

I expect for my terminal to behave consistently, and this is broken every time I log in to a Debian 9 system where I have not configured Vim to disable this functionality. I also see I’m not alone in this frustration.

To fix this, in your .vimrc:

if !has("gui_running")
  set mouse=
endif

(This will check to see if your using GVim or similar, where it would be reasonable to expect the mouse to work.)

This is perhaps not aggresive enough though. I never want to have console applications trying to use the mouse. I’ve configured rxvt to do things like open URLs in Firefox, etc. that I always want to work, and I always want my local clipboard to be used so I can copy/paste between remote machines.

I’ve found a small patch that would appear to disable mouse reporting for rxvt, but unfortunately I cannot do this through an Xresources option. If someone is looking for something to do for Hacktoberfest, I’d love to see this be an option for rxvt without re-compiling:

diff --git a/src/rxvt.h b/src/rxvt.h
index 5c7cf66..2751ba3 100644
--- a/src/rxvt.h
+++ b/src/rxvt.h
@@ -646,7 +646,7 @@ enum {
 #define PrivMode_ExtMouseRight  (1UL<<24) // xterm pseudo-utf-8, but works in non-utf-8-locales
 #define PrivMode_BlinkingCursor (1UL<<25)
 
-#define PrivMode_mouse_report   (PrivMode_MouseX10|PrivMode_MouseX11|PrivMode_MouseBtnEvent|PrivMode_MouseAnyEvent)
+#define PrivMode_mouse_report   0 /* (PrivMode_MouseX10|PrivMode_MouseX11|PrivMode_MouseBtnEvent|PrivMode_MouseAnyEvent) */
 
 #ifdef ALLOW_132_MODE
 # define PrivMode_Default (PrivMode_Autowrap|PrivMode_ShiftKeys|PrivMode_VisibleCursor|PrivMode_132OK)

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