How to get Mouse support for dtterm terminal in solaris

Question

When i run vim inside screen, with TERM set to dtterm, there is no mouse support. How do i enable mouse support for dtterm TERMINAL.

Running TERM with xtermc is not feasible as this garbles the background color in vim when running inside screen.

Answer 1

There is more than one problem:

• xtermc does not match any terminal that you are likely to encounter (noted in xterm FAQ What $TERM should I use?
• dtterm does not match xtermc either (use infocmp xtermc dtterm to see).
• Sun stopped providing up-to-date terminal entries about 20 years ago. Perhaps the last change was related to dtterm . At the time, their /etc/termcap file had an incorrectly-formatted entry for dtterm .
• dtterm does not support xterm-style mouse functionality. As I recall it, the mindset of its developers was that no one used it. So all you can get is GUI-style (non-programmatic) mouse select/paste.
• dtterm does attempt to emulate VT220 (which had no mouse), but has some problems in that (a bug in scrolling).
• ncurses has an improved terminal description for dtterm , but that bug in scrolling cannot be described in terminfo (other than pretending that dtterm cannot scroll).
• dtterm was part of CDE, which Sun deprecated as of Solaris 10. Oracle still provides documentation . Earlier, they dropped OpenWindows in favor of CDE (see transition guide ).
• the escape sequences manual for dtterm does not mention "mouse".

So: you should set TERM to dtterm if you are using that program. vim will not know anything about its mouse capabilities.