If you often use vim, especially while working on remote servers, you know how annoying getting mouse integration to work is. Here is what I have found works best for me. What I wanted was:
- Functional ⌘-C and ⌘-V for copy/paste into and out of the terminal.
- Copy/paste needs to work with tmux running on the remote host.
- Mouse scrolling still works in some form.
Mouse scroll is the thing that suffers here, for me. If you do set mouse=a
you get the best vim scrolling behavior as in this video: As in this video:
But then to copy/paste you must hold Option(⌥) when selecting text with the
mouse. I always forget this, so I settle for worse scrolling by keeping the
mouse setting unset: set mouse= which is the vim default. You also lose the
ability to click a position to locate the cursor at the click. See the
difference:
I also like to use iTerm2’s native support for tmux because I can never remember the default keys. One of the first things I did upon learning tmux was to use personalized keys for actions like splitting windows. That might have been a mistake. Now when I go to a remote server, my custom settings and theme and vim integrations are all useless there.
Here’s a nifty function I found on stackoverflow. I also highly
recommend that you enable completion for the function. My preferred completion
is to behave like ssh so I can tab-complete for hostnames. The compdef
command might be specific to zsh so it might take a little tweaking between
OS’es, distros, and shells.
You’ll notice I use autossh, if you want to use plain ssh replace autossh -M 8888 with ssh and you’re good. You will also want to change the kmaris
session name to something else 🙂. Using new -A -s will ensure that tmux will
use an existing session with that name, or create a new session with that
name.
# tmux+ssh helper function with iterm integration
function tmssh () {
if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
me="${FUNCNAME[0]}${funcstack[1]}"
echo "usage: $me [ssh-args] hostname"
return 1
fi
autossh -M 8888 "$@" -t 'tmux -CC new -A -s kmaris'
}
compdef tmssh=ssh