Xterm Inception

or, How to Use Xterm Mice and Colors in Fish Through iTerm2 Over Mosh (over ssh) in Tmux on Remote Vim and Weechat Terminals.

Inception levels

1. Reality
2. iTerm2
3. fish
4. ssh
5. mosh
6. fish
7. tmux
8. vim, weechat, etc
9. Dream level 1 and so on.

Configuring it all

1. Configure iTerm2 to report itself as an xterm-256color and enable mouse control codes.

2. Ensure your shell’s $TERM recognizes it. You shouldn’t have to force this with any shell init junk.

3. Execute this perl one liner to print the XTerm control sequences to “Use Cell Motion Mouse Tracking” (1002) and “Enable UTF-8 Mouse Mode” (1005). Consider wrapping mosh in something that does this for you.

   perl -E ' print "\e[?1005h\e[?1002h" '
   

4. mosh to the remote host.

5. Configure remote tmux to support mice. Add the following to ~/.tmux.conf

   set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"   # use 256 colors
   set -g status-utf8 on                       # enable utf-8
   set -g mode-mouse on
   

6. Configure vim to follow suit. Add the following to your ~/.vimrc

   set mouse=a
   set ttymouse=xterm2
   

7. Configure weechat to do the same in ~/.weechat/weechat.conf.

   mouse = on
   

A Weird olde tip

Hold option to use your mouse on your local terminal instead of the remote one.

July 3rd, 2013 9:11am