Is there a way to move the caret by the moving the mouse?

Question

In both windows cmd and bash, I'd like to find a way to move the caret by moving the mouse. This would simplify editing the command line for me greatly.

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any mouse support in bash. For zsh, get zsh mouse support. This gives you cursor mouse movement in X terminals under X on Linux and other unices. It probably works on Windows with Cygwin zsh under unix-like terminals such as Cygwin's native rxvt, Mintty or PuTTYcyg.

Answer 2

You could try xdotool for bash.

xdotool getmouselocation 

gives you the mouse location as a coordinate of your screen, you could probably script this to capture mouse motion... and then use

xdotool key

to get the corresponding direction key.

Basically, you can probably write a script to press the left direction key, for example, when the x coordinate of the mouse shifts by a certain number of pixels down. it depends on your screen resolution.

EDIT: This works for me on a horizontal direction. However, you need to think of a way to shut it down if u want it off. Closing the terminal would work.

while true; do horiz=$(xdotool getmouselocation | cut -d" " -f1 | grep -o [0-9]*); if [ ${horiz} -gt ${horiz2} ]; then xdotool key Right; elif [ ${horiz} -lt ${horiz2} ]; then xdotool key Left; fi ; horiz2=$horiz; done &

Answer 3

Not many of the newer terminals have mouse support, but I think xterm, rxvt and Eterm do.