Mouse in screen(1) on the Linux console?

Question

How can I use the mouse in GNU screen on the Linux console? I would expect this to have to go via gpm, but that doesn't seem to happen by default, even if the curses library does link to libgpm. (This may be related to screen's termcap heritage...)

Answer 1

From the latest GNU Screen Changelog has an entry for mouse usage:

* 'defmousetrack' and 'mousetrack', to turn on/off mouse-tracking for
  displays. It's turned off by default. With mouse-tracking turned on, it's
  possible to switch to a region ('focus') using mouse clicks. It's also
  possible to select a text region in copy-mode using a mouse click to place
  a mark and the scroll wheel to scroll through the buffer. Additional
  features might be to allow clicking on window-titles in the caption to
  switch to that window.

Debian unstable seems to have the latest gnu screen with the configuration above.

$dpkg -l screen
[...]
ii  screen                 4.1.0~20120320gi amd64            terminal multiplexer with VT100/ANSI terminal emu

Have fun!