GNU screen: change focus in split windows with mouse

One can add

mousetrack on
defmousetrack on

to ~/.screenrc

(For more, see the manual)

I believe that GNU Screen's upstream may have proper mouse support. See Mouse in screen(1) on the Linux console?.

Also check Debian Sid (unstable), since according to the first answer found for the said post, Debian Unstable has the latest version/release thingy of GNU Screen.

This, however, may mean that you'll have to build Screen from source, which in of itself shouldn't be too difficult, but if you've never done this kind of thing before it can be a bit intimidating.

I realize this question is a little old, but I'd like to add that mousetrack seems to swallow the mouse events used for drag-select, at least on my installation of Ubuntu 16.04. So you have a choice: click-to-focus, or drag-select to highlight/copy text.

The workaround I've found for this is to bind a pair of keys to toggle mouseselect on & off. In ~/.screenrc:

# Click region to focus, toggled by Alt-[ / Alt-]
# (When on, swallows mouse events for drag-select)
bindkey "^[[" mousetrack off
bindkey "^[]" mousetrack on