19

Both my local and remote are Ubuntu 18, though I have seen it in 16 as well.

I establish a ssh to my remote server, start tmux (2.1.3), something causes the pipe to break. When I ssh back in, but before I start tmux, whenever I click in the terminal screen, it writes a bunch of junk to the buffer, like

0;38;15M 0;38;15m 0;60;12M0;60;12m0;56;14M0;56;14m0;56;14M0;56;14m0;54;13M0;54;13m0;54;13M0;54;13m

I've deduced that these numbers are of the form N;X;YM, where N is 0, 1, 2... for left click, middle, right click, X and Y are proportional to the location of the mouse click, M is mouse down, m is mouse up.

Clearly, this is some kind of in-band signalling, and I am pretty sure it relates to option mouse on. But where is it coming from? Is it just a Tmux thing, an ssh thing, or a Gnome terminal thing?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
26

These are escape sequences that tell tmux about mouse events. Because tmux was disconnected unexpectedly it didn't get a chance to turn mouse mode off so the terminal is still sending them even though no application wants them. You can run "reset" to turn it off.

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5
  • Cool! That reset trick was handy. So is this something in the underlying TTY spec to pick up mouse events? I imagine the terminal emulator must be picking up the mouse events and converting them to the escape codes?
    – DeusXMachina
    Jun 12, 2019 at 19:31
  • 1
    Right the terminal emulator gets mouse events from X or whatever and sends them to the application (if it requests them).
    – Nicholas Marriott
    Jun 12, 2019 at 20:20
  • 1
    The stuff you are seeing is SGR mouse mode, there are several others. It's in here somewhere invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html
    – Nicholas Marriott
    Jun 12, 2019 at 20:30
  • Ah, precisely what I was looking for! Not at all surprised X is behind this. So cool.
    – DeusXMachina
    Jun 12, 2019 at 21:01
  • 5
    run reset or tput reset
    – Shital Shah
    Dec 14, 2019 at 10:07

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