Not having this has been my #1 Terminal frustration for years... and it's been there this whole time?!?!
This type of thing has actually happened to me several times in the past year or so, where I'd be frustrated an obviously good feature doesn't exist, I'd Google it to see if other people complain about the same thing... only to find it exists after all.
It's been one of my #1 terminal frustrations, too!!! But instead of relying on GUIs and the mouse, I started to use terminal tools and wrote a plugin for tmux that helped me. https://github.com/schasse/tmux-jump
Maybe it's useful for you.
If I read the manual for everything I've ever used, I'm not sure I'd have time to actually accomplish anything in the end.
Sure, let me spend a day reading through the lists of keyboard/mouse shortcuts for every piece of software I use just to see if there's anything useful in there? No thanks...
Good UX would pop up a balloon informing me of the feature after the first time I held down my left-arrow key for more than, say, keypresses.
CLIs are like that. On the bright side, things rarely change. So the stuff you read in the manual 30 years ago still likely works. I prefer it over relearning GUIs with every update.
Of course, you might as well disregard the manual and discover things on your own as you need them. Nevertheless, it helps to go at this with a mindset of "this feature surely already exists" lest you're compelled to develop a worse version of the feature yourself.
While technically true, I tend to forget what I read after some time, especially tips and tricks that did not seem that
useful when I first read them. So RTFM is not the silver bullet unless you somehow have a system that reminds you to re-read every manual every x months.
How can you know that this is a common idiom? Is there an (prob. GNU)-document for these things?
Two reasons I am asking:
1) I feel terrible reading this, since my last post was preaching for XCFE for this exact functionality.
2) It would be awesome to have these things bundled and discover many things which are yet not discovered by me.
The major Linux desktops have had this sort of thing for like 15 years. It’s usually only discovered by people who obsessively tweak their settings, though.
Anyone that hasn't been exclusively using macOS for their entire digital life, or at least years, anyway.
'Command' (resp. 'Windows', resp. 'Super') is a different story. You can't say 'Super' with a straight face without also marking yourself out as someone who borders on saying 'GNU with Linux', or 'I run Arch'.
(For what it's worth, I do run Arch. ;))
IIRC Option is dually labelled as Alt on some Apple keyboards anyway.
> You can't say 'Super' with a straight face without also marking yourself out as someone who borders on saying 'GNU with Linux', or 'I run Arch'.
Since basically nobody knows the historical difference these days, I just call it the Meta key to avoid the above situation. When non-techy people ask me what the hell I mean, I just explain that's the technical term for the key and that I use it so both Mac and Windows people understand me. I've even heard one of them start using the term themselves, presumably to appear smarter in front of their boss.
While it's not wrong to refer to the Super key as "Meta", I don't like calling it that, because in some contexts (like emacs), "Meta" means the Alt key.
By the way, recently discovered you can get some of these shortcuts in all input boxes by activating “emacs shortcuts” inside of gnome-tweaks! Was one of the final blockers for getting me from Mac to Linux
To add what was an essential follow-up for me when I discovered this: Once you’ve enabled mouse=a, use the alt key to select text in vim for your system clipboard, rather than vim’s visual mode.
I don't understand this part. How do you select using Alt?
Typically with mouse enabled, you can select text with the mouse, but this doesn't go to the X clipboard. While with mouse disabled, text selected with the mouse goes to the X clipboard.
What I had meant was that when using vim configured with mouse=a, selecting with the mouse while holding down the Alt key would disable the terminal emulator's mouse reporting and allow the selection to be copied to the system clipboard.
But actually this depends entirely on the terminal emulator. The Alt/Option key works with the default preferences for iTerm2 on MacOS, but with GNOME terminal I reproduced the same behavior using Shift instead.
Found another interesting problem. mouse=a works great on my Ubuntu laptop; however, it has no impact when connected to Linux servers via Putty - when I click somewhere in the vim window, the cursor doesn't jump to that spot.
