No more no surprises

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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