MouseTerm

MouseTerm is a SIMBL plugin for Mac OS X's Terminal.app that passes mouse events to the terminal, allowing you to use mouse shortcuts within applications that support them.

To get started, first install SIMBL (MouseTerm won't work without it!). Once you've done that, open the .dmg file, run Install, and restart Terminal.app. To uninstall, run Uninstall from the .dmg.

Download

MouseTerm.dmg (116 KB, requires Leopard or newer)

Status

MouseTerm is currently beta quality software. It's feature complete, but still needs testing.

What works:

Mouse button reporting.
Mouse scroll wheel reporting.
Simulated mouse wheel scrolling for programs like less (i.e. any fullscreen program that uses application cursor key mode).
Terminal profile integration (with preferences dialog).

What's being worked on:

A nicer preferences dialog.

Frequently Asked Questions

What programs can I use the mouse in?

This varies widely and depends on the specific program. less, Emacs, and Vim are good places to test out mouse reporting.

How do I disable mouse reporting temporarily?

Use "Send Mouse Events" in the Shell menu.

How do I configure mouse reporting on a profile basis?

In the preferences dialog under Settings, you can configure terminal profiles. Select the profile you want to configure, go to the Keyboard section, and click the "Mouse..." button to change what mouse buttons are reported to programs in the terminal.

How do I enable mouse reporting in Vim?

To enable the mouse for all modes add the following to your ~/.vimrc file:

if has("mouse")
    set mouse=a
endif

Run :help mouse for more information and other possible values.

What about enabling it in Emacs?

By default MouseTerm will use simulated mouse wheel scrolling in Emacs. To enable terminal mouse support, add this to your ~/.emacs file:

(unless window-system
  (xterm-mouse-mode 1)
  (global-set-key [mouse-4] '(lambda ()
                               (interactive)
                               (scroll-down 1)))
  (global-set-key [mouse-5] '(lambda ()
                               (interactive)
                               (scroll-up 1))))

Development

Download the official development repository using Git:

git clone git://github.com/brodie/mouseterm.git

Run make to compile the plugin, and make install to install it into your home directory's SIMBL plugins folder. make test will install the plugin and run a second instance of Terminal.app for testing.

Visit GitHub if you'd like to fork the project, watch for new changes, or report issues.

JRSwizzle and some mouse reporting code from iTerm are used in MouseTerm. Ragel is used for parsing control codes.

Contact

Contact information can be found on my site, brodierao.com.

Thanks to Tom Feist and Scott Kroll for their contributions.