How I Switched to Plan 9

Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by hollerith on Thursday December 05, 2019 @01:51PM (#21715074)

Does GPM let you move the insertion point in nano or vim? It didn't when I last used it 12 or 13 years ago. All it let me do was select a region of text from the screen plus the scrollback buffer of the linux console. Then I could choose to copy that region. And IIRC, the copy had a newline wherever the text being displayed had a newline and where one line of the linux console ended and the next line began, so if what I was copying had any lines that ran longer than the screen width, I'd have to manually remove the second type of newlines after pasting.

And when the user selected text using GPM, the program (e.g., nano) never learned of it: it was local to GPM and the linux console.

The man page you linked states, "The selection mechanism is disabled if the controlling virtual console is placed in graphics mode, for example when running X11, and is re-enabled when text mode is resumed," (then goes on the describe how sometimes it does not get re-enabled because of a bug).

Can a modern PC even be put into text mode anymore? (Honest question: I do not know.)

Have you ever gotten GPM to work with X11 or Wayland?

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Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by shakna on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:32PM (#21717410)

> Does GPM let you move the insertion point in nano or vim?

If you enable mouse support. (set mouse for nano and set mouse=a in vim).

> Have you ever gotten GPM to work with X11 or Wayland?

That'd be rather... Pointless. X11 and Wayland already allow the mouse to work without GPM. Just enable the mouse in nano, vim or whatever, and it'll work.

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Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by hollerith on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:49PM (#21717552)

Whatever terminal-emulation app (e.g., Gnome Terminal) you are using will allow you to select text in the app's window, but nano or vim will never know about it. I.e., the user's mouse gestures are never transmitted to the program (e.g., nano) on the other side of the pseudo-TTY (PTY).

So for example, the user cannot use the mouse to move the insertion point in nano.

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Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by shakna on Thursday December 05, 2019 @06:54PM (#21717988)

> So for example, the user cannot use the mouse to move the insertion point in nano.

That is not the case if you enable mouse support, as I've said.

Try it. Add:

    set mouse

To ~/.nanorc

Open a file, and click. The insertion point will move.

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Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by hollerith on Thursday December 05, 2019 @07:16PM (#21718152)

Oh, OK. Good to know. Thanks for your reply. vim, too?

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Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by shakna on Thursday December 05, 2019 @07:19PM (#21718172)

The vim command needed to enable support is:

    set mouse=a

But yes, it works basically the same.

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