Building an emacs to use the mouse in the linux console

Building an emacs to use the mouse in the linux console

[joao.moreira]

Hello,

I'm trying build an emacs binary that will let me use the mouse when running in the Linux console. I'm running Fedora 16 (LXDE spin), I installed gpm, and I compiled Emacs 24.1 from source, but copy-paste is not working. I can use the mouse to select text, but when trying to paste I get a message saying "Symbol's function definition is void: x-get-selection-internal".

When building emacs, it first complained that I was running X but had no X development libraries. So I configured it with the '--without-x' option, and at the end of the 'configure' run it said emacs would use '-lgpm'. So I'm puzzled by the 'x-' function, do I need X libraries to use the mouse ? I certainly hope not...

The emacs 23.3 that comes with Fedora is able to copy-paste in the console, but of course, I don't know how they built it. What's the right way to go about this ? How can I build and configure emacs 24.1 so that the mouse is fully functional in the Linux console wth gpm ? Am I missing some elisp package ? or is it mandatory to include teh X libraries ?

Joao

Re: Building an emacs to use the mouse in the linux console

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:16:25 +0200 (CEST)
> From: joao.moreira@free.fr
> 
> I'm trying build an emacs binary that will let me use the mouse when running in the Linux console. I'm running Fedora 16 (LXDE spin), I installed gpm, and I compiled Emacs 24.1 from source, but copy-paste is not working. I can use the mouse to select text, but when trying to paste I get a message saying "Symbol's function definition is void: x-get-selection-internal".

This is expected: the GPM support on a TTY does not include copy/paste
feature.  No one wrote the code to do that.  Patches are welcome.

> When building emacs, it first complained that I was running X but had no X development libraries. So I configured it with the '--without-x' option, and at the end of the 'configure' run it said emacs would use '-lgpm'. So I'm puzzled by the 'x-' function, do I need X libraries to use the mouse ?

No, you don't need X.  It's just that, for historical reasons, many
functions related to GUI features have names that start with "x-".

> The emacs 23.3 that comes with Fedora is able to copy-paste in the console, but of course, I don't know how they built it. What's the right way to go about this ?

Sorry, I don't know.  Maybe someone else could help.  Also, the value
of the variable system-configuration-options might reveal something
about the way Emacs was configured, and running ldd on the executable
will show which shared libraries it uses.  Maybe that will give a
clue.

Re: Building an emacs to use the mouse in the linux console

[Andreas Schwab]

The problem is that mouse-yank-primary calls x-get-selection without
checking whether the frame supports it.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
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