Allow more interactive apps (`man`, `less` etc.) to disable blocks and take over mouse input and scrolling

[mitranim]

Pre-submit Checks

• I have searched Warp feature requests and there are no duplicates
• I have searched Warp docs and my feature is not there

Describe the solution you'd like?

This is somewhere between a bug report and a feature request.

I'd like apps like man and less to take over the terminal, disabling blocks, similar to the behavior of vim.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently, some interactive apps (vim, yazi, btop) correctly take over the terminal, while some others (man, less, more) don't.

Comparing the app behaviors, this seems to be related to mouse input. The "correct" behavior of disabling blocks and taking over is exhibited by apps which support mouse input. The "incorrrect" behavior is exhibited by interactive apps which don't support mouse input. So I'm guessing this is the heuristic Warp uses.

There's probably another, more general heuristic Warp could use, to detect apps such as less which don't request mouse input.

See the attached video for an example. It shows me scrolling up and down. In the vim case, scrolling is limited to the actual CLI app, without spilling over to Warp's history and blocks. In the less case, scrolling "spills out" outside the app.

warp_blocks_720.mov

Additional context

Warp version: v0.2025.10.08.08.12.stable_03

Operating system (OS)

macOS

How important is this feature to you?

2

Warp Internal (ignore) - linear-label:39cc6478-1249-4ee7-950b-c428edfeecd1

None

[mitranim]

Turns out this was my fault. less in fact does support mouse input, and works correctly in Warp by default. But I had the following in my ~/.zprofile:

export LESS='-F -g -i -M -R -S -w -X -z-4 '

Turns out, -X disables mouse input in less, which in turn prevents Warp from recognizing less as a proper full-screen interactive app. Removing this flag fixes the problem.

-X was there for padding at the screen edges, but it also requires preexec() { clear } to minimize issues with scrolling, which is currently incompatible with Warp anyway (see #7664).

This means less and man should work properly out of the box for most users. Still, it would be nice if this tiny edge case could be fixed.

[mitranim]

Found a more legit example: gforth. Its REPL mode does not support / request mouse input, resulting in the same weirdness as recorded above. Unlike my less blunder, this isn't the result of turning off a feature; gforth is keyboard-only.