Adding mouse- and selection-support to kmscon
Table of Contents
Pile up of itches to scratch
The output-rotation is now working as I initially intended, and there is also gyro/accelerometer support in the pipe. But using my version of kmscon daily now, I quickly ran into the issue of missing cut&paste functionality, which one usually gets via gpm, when using the old-school text-console VTs under Linux.
“How hard can it be? Can’t be that much work ;)” whizzes by my mind. I have dealt with nastier things in the past without prior knowledge or preparation. Occasionally I am a magnificent douchebag for having these very thoughts *sigh*
The pieces for non-blocking reading from the kernel’s input-subsystem work… wheeeeee… I could even do multi-touch stuff now with my Apple Wireless Trackpad or the trackpads of my Lenovo laptops. So far no ideas for that though. Coder-art graphics for a mouse-cursor and rubberband-selection are added too… for verification of logic and general functionality. That will not stay. The visual direction I am aiming for you can see here…
… and here…
The hard chunk of work is getting to know libtsm, which is used by kmscon for the terminal-emulator-y things. That I am not so much looking forward to. I’ll probably finish the gyro/accelerometer support first.
Getting back in touch with community
In the meantime I managed to get in contact with Victor Weterhuis from the debian and ubuntu communities. So it will be easier to spread the word, get some feedback and add my patches to proper kmscon-packages in these distros.
I still would like to at least get somebody on the fedora-side of things into the loop. If you read this and are part of the ‘fancy hat’-crowd ;), I gladly help with getting my patches up and running there. I have packages of my version of libtsm and kmscon in copr already.
Should you read this and be part of the SuSE-, Mint-, Arch-, Gentoo- or <your favorite distro>-community and still love fancy fast terminal-emulators… drop me an email.
Design feedback
Finally I invite all GUI/UX/UI folks – with a soft spot for marvelous terminal-emulators – to reach out and provide feedback, make suggestions or tell me how lame non-graphical/non-AI interfaces are these days 🙂 No one presses Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V or the middle mouse-button anymore, everything goes through Chat-GPT, right?!