Re: How to set background-color without damaging cut&paste ?

[Peter <pmc@citylink.dinoex.sub.org>]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2024 at 07:41:02PM +0700, Yuri Khan wrote:
! On Wed, 4 Sept 2024 at 06:37, Peter <pmc@citylink.dinoex.sub.org> wrote:
! 
! > However, after setting the background-color, the result is this:
! >
! > 00000000  46 69 72 73 74 20 4c 69  6e 65 20 20 20 20 20 20  |First Line      |
! > 00000010  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |                |
! > 00000020  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |                |
! > 00000030  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |                |
! > 00000040  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20  |                |
! 
! You’re getting the default mouse selection handling by your terminal
! emulator, which is not guaranteed to be correct for full-screen
! applications.

This sounds strange - why should the default mouse selection handling
be dependent on the individual text color?

The issue does not only happen with background-color. It does also
happen when using 'conf-mode' (and probably others with syntax
highlighting). In that case it depends on the actual color of the
text: some lines are filled with trailing spaces, some are not.

! Example: if you enable ‘toggle-truncate-lines’ and have several
! adjacent lines that are too wide for the terminal window, the terminal
! emulator will highlight and copy only the displayed parts of the
! lines.

This is known and accepted; overly long lines need manual treatment
with copy/paste. But dangling spaces on correctly formatted lines,
i.e. after a terminating backslash denoting a line continuation,
result in really bad malfunctions and are not easily detected.

! Consider enabling xterm-mouse-mode.

I tried this already. Sadly, either I don't understand it or it does
not work at all.
The usecase here is that I have dozens of nodes in different parts
of the world. All of them can be opened in xterms. So opening them
side by side, one can easily compare config files and copy/paste
snippets from one to another.