[Proposal] Vi mode #136

Many console apps like gomuks don't allow text selection with the mouse. Mouse click is used for other options. All I can do is to use search hotkeys and search for the exact match, which is suboptimal for me. Imo something like switching to vi mode would be great. It will work well, even for the url selection. I'm not sure whether that fits with your project goals, tho.

While I have been thinking about ways to do selections using the keyboard (be it vi-mode or something else), your problem is much easier to solve: simply hold down Shift and then you can use the mouse to select text (you'll see the mouse pointer change when you do this).

Thanks.

Should I keep it open or to close it then?

Lets keep it open.

I don't have any plans to implement this in the near (or far) future, but I'm not against the feature per se.

@FoundOne sounds like you want tmux. Advanced operations like vi-mode, buffer-piping, regex search, URL-matching, session management, etc. are best left to a program that specializes in them so you can get those features in every terminal emulator, inc. virtual consoles. Terminal emulators like Alacritty and Kitty have already gone down the route of replicating tmux's features, and I'd rather not end up with more of the same.

I've been perfectly able to select text in gomuks with tmux.

@Seirdy I've been thinking about this for some time, and what I'd like to see is an improved scrollback search, with better control over the selection. For example, using the arrow keys to fine adjust the selection.

I agree that a full blown vi mode is probably too much.

I'll keep this issue open a little while longer, but am currently leaning towards closing this as a wontfix.

Closing as wontfix.

As stated above, a full vi mode is going too far for a terminal that is supposed to be lightweight. Users who want this functionality should use e.g. tmux.

Alacritty already has vi mode builtin & the codebase for it in rust. Could it be easier to bring those patches here, as rust to C translation wouldn't be that much different ?

I'm an extensive keyboard user, so switching to mouse just to select text would be inefficient & unproductive.