Mouse control in Linux app not working, generates garbage input instead

[lproven]

I just wrote a new story about Ghostty 1 for the Register. I tried it on both macOS (Sequoia) and Ubuntu (24.10, Unity desktop on X.org, fully updated).

I found a problem with my preferred text editor, Tilde. This is a CUA-compliant text editor for the Linux console or shell. It does not use X11 or any graphics. It does have mouse support, though, and the user can navigate the menus with the mouse, either on the console if you have gpm or in a terminal emulator.

Not in Ghostty, though. Clicking the mouse button produces garbage input: button down inputs {space}?( and button up inputs #?(. Middle-click produces !R(#R( and right-click "S(#S(.

The garbage is not 100% consistent with repeated clicks.

It does it both running as root and as an ordinary user.

I also note that under the Unity desktop the title bar has no minimise/maximise/close buttons. There's no way to close the app with a mouse other than right-clicking the title bar. The buttons do appear in the top panel when maximised, though. Google Chrome also uses its own custom title bar, but it does not suffer this problem and has the usual [close]/[minimise]/[maximise] buttons at top left, both when in a floating window and when maximised. Like Ghostty, Chrome also does not have a menu bar in normal use, but under Unity, it does correctly use the Unity global menu in the top panel. So it is possible.

[rhodes-b]

Looking at the repo they list ncurses as a dependency if it is only uses ncurses for terminfo then I dont expect that editor to work properly in ghostty for awhile.

Ghostty was accepted into ncurses but it will take time for that to distribute into various distros

similar to the ssh TERM env listed here
https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#configure-ssh-to-fall-back-to-a-known-terminfo-entry

you should be able to alias your editor to alias tilde="TERM=xterm-256color tilde" then it should work sucessfully
(note the example is bash alias and may not work in other shells)