Understand mouse events in Tmux on the shell vs. outside Tmux

[sinkr]

3.5a, macOS 15.4, ZSH

I've spent several days as a learning exercise trying to figure out why on a (ZSH) shell prompt outside of tmux. For the most part the mouse just works except outside of tmux I can click to position the cursor on the shell prompt and in tmux I cannot.

No matter what terminal settings, passthrough, terminal features, terminal type the crux of the issue is this:

Outside of tmux on the shell prompt if I hit CTRL-V and mouse click to the left of typed text, I get ^[[D.

Inside tmux, this does not work. Can someone help me understand what's happening?

[nicm]

Probably this program is not enabling the mouse when in tmux, check if tmux display -p '#{mouse_any_flag}' says 1 or 0.

[sinkr]

Sorry, I just assumed it was more tmux set mouse off/on.

tmux display -p '#{mouse_any_flag}'                                                                                                                   
0

[nicm]

OK this means the application has not turned on the mouse (ie sent the mouse escape sequences), which means tmux will not send mouse events to it. Most likely it has a whitelist of TERM values or some other way to decide if it should turn on the mouse.

[nicm]

I don't really know anything about zsh so you may have to ask them how to make it turn the mouse on in tmux.

[sinkr]

OK, thank you. This is new information that is helpful. This is outside the scope of Tmux, but I did find some very old ZSH scripts that enable the mouse and it works in Tmux (somewhat), but it also gobbles up my ability to enter scrollback.

[mattcheau]

What happened to your "Whatever, bigshot" comment/attitude? 😂