Cannot option+click to select text in less --mouse <file>

[Tyriar]

VS Code issue: microsoft/vscode#165004

[Tyriar]

I'm not sure what the right fix is here actually.

[jerch]

@Tyriar

Imho there are multiple things unclear here:

• Who does the highlighting here? Is this normal TE mouse semantics, or done by less (thus by mouse reports --> less updates cell contents in inverse)? To find that out, someone would have to grab the pty data either from iTerm (if thats possible) or do the option + click thing with a mouse reporting script in iTerm (bin/test_mousemodes.js can be used for that after finding out the mouse mode less --mouse uses). To me it certainly looks like option+ skips mouse reports in iTerm2 here.
• The cross pointer in xterm.js demo case indicates, that the rectangular selection is bound to that key. To mimick iTerms behavior, this would have to be configurable (imho its currently hardcoded that way in xterm.js). I am not sure, if this should be changed easily, the rectangular selection idea is there for years now, and ppl might simply complain the other way around, if it got changed to something else. So basically I see here a conflict of user interface metaphors and what users are expecting to work. And for sure we cannot cover all of those, as a std keyboard only has ~3 combining keys.

Btw regarding normal mouse semantics while mouse reports are active for app side, @christianparpart has brought up the idea of a passive mouse reporting mode, where the normal mouse semantics can stay active: https://github.com/contour-terminal/vt-extensions/blob/master/passive-mouse-tracking.md
Imho thats the real solution for the underlying problem here (being able to highlight text, while less has mouse reports running), maybe we should adopt that?

[Tyriar]

@jerch when I did the same in iterm I was able to get less to select the range with option+click, I don't think I was able to do that with xterm.js regardless of settings. I might have been doing something wrong though as I went through an awful lot of issues the past week.

RE rectangle selection, this feels secondary to me and should be disabled if macOptionIsMeta is set.