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I am aware that the mousefocus option is only supposed to work in gVim. But I was wondering, if it's possible to have the console Vim switch to different windows in response to mouse clicks, would it be not possible to easily add following mouse movement to it, too?

I'm an xmonad user, I love the focus following the pointer feature, I do a lot of pdf viewing and browsing while writing in Vim, and I'd be so much happier if I didn't have to keep mentally switching back and forth between two different types of focus changing.

If that's completely not possible, I guess opening new Vim windows (as with :split) in new instances of the terminal is no easier to do?

Kamil S.
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  • this was my reason for migrating to `neovim` where split panes can be switched with the mouse and where mouse scrolling within panes works as expected – ccpizza Sep 15 '19 at 09:00

3 Answers3

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It would not be at all simple to add this. Using the mouse within the terminal works by vim sending control codes to the terminal requesting that mouse actions be sent as part of the input stream. Terminals only report clicks not changes in the pointer position, so vim has no way of knowing where the mouse is.

With major changes it would likely be possible for a vim with X support to get pointer activity directly from the X server, but that would likely be reported by pixel rather than by character so further work would need to be done before it could determine which vim window is currently under the pointer.

qqx
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  • Thank you for the answer. I think I have an idea how to work around this in an ugly way. I'll post it here if I come up with anything usable. – Kamil S. Dec 05 '12 at 17:05
  • @ErcanErden How is scrolling relevant? For me it doesn't work in a way that is relevant to this question; using the scroll wheel scrolls the vim window which was selected not the one which the pointer is over. – qqx Sep 23 '13 at 11:45
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    @qqx : On my machine( linux, urxvt-unicode) it scrolls the vim window (vertical or horizontal splits) under the mouse pointer but cursor still stays in the original window. – Ercan Erden Oct 03 '13 at 02:27
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set mouse=a

should do the trick but it will probably depend on your terminal emulator. See :help 'mouse'.

romainl
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    That still requires clicking the mouse to select a window, the question was how to have the window under the pointer be selected without needing to click in the window. – qqx Dec 04 '12 at 23:36
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This works for Windows 7/Cygwin 32bit mintty/vim 7.3: (I DO NOT use gvim!)

Having installed this: http://ehiti.de/katmouse/, I can scroll the window under my cursor without having to have clicked to select a window, click-selecting of single vim-windows works, too. It does not pull the vim window to the foreground, if another window overlaps it, if that is what you desire. Still it can be scrolled without click-selecting it first.

So:
Check if there exists a software paket for your distribution, that implements your desired mouse behavior on the OS level. When this works for my self-compiled vim in cygwin, it might very well work with console vim on linux, too.

This post here serves as evidence, that it is possible at all, that is the reason this was not made a comment. When I am on linux again I will investigate this further and update this post, but that might take a while.

On set mouse=a: The vim help states you a need a terminal capable of handling mouse inputs, further information can be found here. :help ttymouse might also be helpful, i.e. if you have a xterm-compliant console, but :help term is set to something else.

UPDATE: (Freshly installed Fedora 19 with packages, no self-compiled stuff.)

Fedora 19 + se mouse=a = scrolling in single console vim window with several buffers opened next to each other independently works, too. Window manager used is LXDE.

sjas
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  • Are you saying this works for vim windows (where there are multiple files open within a single OS-level window) or just OS-level windows? I'd be quite surprised if some arbitrary program would cause that to work for vim windows. – qqx Sep 23 '13 at 11:48
  • @qqx the behaviour I described works when when a single terminal emulator window (mintty.exe is used) is opened, console vim is running within it. Console vim itself has several windows opened side by side. As long as KatMouse is running, I can scroll each vim window if the mouse cursor is within the boundaries of the vim window in question. Something like screen or tmux is not used. `se mouse=a` is needed. – sjas Sep 23 '13 at 13:35