Re: mouse support

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Andreas wrote:

> Hi!
>
> What is the state of the mouse support?
>
> Does ncursed handel the mouse wheel and mouse wheel button?

I suppose it could - but (aside from xterm), which terminal emulators
do anything useful with this?

X can pass information from a 2-3 button wheel mouse as buttons 4 and 5. A 
quick check with vttest does show they're present (buttons 4/5).  But a 
similar check with the ncurses test program shows some different 
interpretation (and looking at the curses.h file gives the answer - 
there's encoding only for 4 buttons).

To handle something like a wheel mouse properly, it would be necessary to
add a new interface to ncurses.  (Something new to add to my to-do list).

patches, of course, are welcome.

> I dont get mouse support to work in my ncurses app.
> I have tested the program in this tutorial:
> http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/mouse.html
>
> Is this "the way" it's ment to be done to get mouse support working? or am I 
> totaly wrong here?

I think the simple answer is that in 1995 when the interface was defined,
there weren't enough wheel mice to have noticed them.

Of course X doesn't handle 2-wheel mice (similar issue - not enough bits 
in the right place).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net