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Comment by geor9e | Hacker News Reader

Different person here, but I wish there was a terminal where mouse clicks moved the text cursor (without holding any hotkey), mouse drags selected text and typing replaced the selected text, ctrl-A selected the entire current command (all the text after $ ), holding left/right arrow went WAY faster…

Basically, if you know how to competently edit an email, you shouldn't struggle in frustration at editing a big terminal command. I believe that some day there will be a terminal app you can sit a kid down in front of, and they're be able to fix a typo without any frustration or special knowledge. That day hasn't yet come.

I get the historical traditions for why terminal is the way it is, and I get why people who already know the secrets don't care to change it, but IMO it's time to move on.

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> Basically, if you know how to competently edit an email, you shouldn't struggle in frustration at editing a big terminal command. I believe that some day there will be a terminal app you can sit a kid down in front of, and they're be able to fix a typo without any frustration or special knowledge. That day hasn't yet come.

In BASH, set $EDITOR to whatever you want - even a GUI editor - and then hit (by default) ctrl-x ctrl-e and it'll open the current line in your editor and when you save+close the editor the command will run.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/85391/where-is-the-... seems like a decent discussion of the feature, and its footguns (it does execute whatever was in the buffer when you close the editor without confirmation), and even some talk of how to improve it a bit.

> without holding any hotkey

It's up to individual applications how they implement user input. All of this is entirely possible in modern terminal emulators - look at the micro text editor, for example.

I guess most shells (bash, zsh, etc.) keep things "traditional" for backwards compatibility reasons.

>Different person here, but I wish there was a terminal where mouse clicks moved the text cursor (without holding any hotkey)

Umm, This is a `feature` in Konsole that I ___HATE___. I'd have a file open in vim that I'm editing. I'd also have a browser window open and I'm trying to copy text over to my terminal.

Well, wherever you click in the terminal window to 'activate' it for pasting, causes the active line to jump to that place regardless of where your cursor was before. IT'S HORRIBLE!!

I'd much rather click on the window, then ctrl-v to paste my clipboard. Now I have to be extra careful and just click on the windows decoration/header, or frame. This has caused me dozens of missed-pastes.

For vim it’s something like :set nomouse to disable this. I go out of my way to disable mouse control in the terminal too

Some terminals support mouse input without any special modifier keys. I’ve used vim in iterm doing exactly that.

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