Select with mouse with scrolling feature

[og900aero]

Is there a patch that solves the problem that when I want to select text in the terminal that spans multiple pages, if I start selecting with the mouse and reach the bottom of the window, it continues to scroll (as in Alacritty, for example)?

[bakkeby]

I vaguely remember a discussion about this, but I am not aware of any patches that makes st scroll when selecting text beyond the last (or first) line.

In principle this should be possible considering that you can still scroll using the mouse wheel while selecting text. This is arguably less convenient than a terminal that scrolls automatically.

A general tip though:

For work purposes I frequently need to select and copy text across hundreds of pages (e.g. logs taking several megabytes). In this case scrolling is not an effective use of my time.

What I do is that I start my grep and then immediately scroll up a few lines. Eventually the grep finishes, at which point I scroll down again and I press and hold shift while selecting the first character of the starting line. Then while still holding down shift and the mouse button I hit the End key which scrolls the terminal all the way down to the prompt. After which I just move the mouse to select the end of the text and then it is just a matter of copy-paste.

[og900aero]

That's a shame :( Then maybe I'll go back to Alacritty. Thanks for the idea.

[bakkeby]

I had a quick play around and adding this towards the end of bmotion seems to work just fine in both directions.

diff --git a/x.c b/x.c
index 627e352..dc86322 100644
--- a/x.c
+++ b/x.c
@@ -855,6 +855,8 @@ brelease(XEvent *e)
 void
 bmotion(XEvent *e)
 {
+       XMotionEvent *me = &e->xmotion;
+
        #if HIDECURSOR_PATCH
        if (!xw.pointerisvisible) {
                #if SWAPMOUSE_PATCH
@@ -885,6 +887,14 @@ bmotion(XEvent *e)
                return;
        }

+       if (e->xbutton.state & Button1Mask) {
+               if (me->y < borderpx + win.ch / 2) {
+                       kscrollup(&((Arg){ .i = 1 }));
+               } else if (me->y > win.h - borderpx - win.ch / 2) {
+                       kscrolldown(&((Arg){ .i = 1 }));
+               }
+       }
+
        mousesel(e, 0);
 }

[og900aero]

Whoaaa! It's working great! U are a genius :)

[bakkeby]

Makes me wonder why there isn't a patch like that already. Seems like something that is present in most terminal emulators.

I am thinking of just adding it as part of the scrollback mouse patch.