Apple - Option + click in iTerm

I was wondering "How Hard Can It Be(c)" to implement it and gave it a go today.

The Terminal.app seems to emulate 'move cursor to left/right' ESC sequences. You'll hear the famous 'beep' if you try to place the cursor in the shell prompt. And you'll hear it as many times as there are invalid moves.

The solution in iTerm2 works the same by invoking the appropriate ESC sequences. Although it beeps only once if you try to place the cursor in an invalid area ;)

Terminal.app seems not to be able to handle multi-line prompts, only moving on the last line seems to work. Multi-line prompts in this implementation should be handled correct.

Results can be found on github. It's a fork of the original with a pending pull request. The branch I work on is named 'option-click-hardcoded'.

And of course it's highly untested. That means tested only by me on my late-2007 MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.7.3.

If you'd like try it out by compiling it yourself or download the precompiled binary for i386/x86_64/ppc iTerm_v1.0.0.git-085ec22c.zip).

iTerm 2 is not a new version of iTerm - while based on the same source code, there are major changes under the hood. One of the things that was removed or broken (hard to speak to the developer's intent) was cursor positioning.

You're not the only one who noticed this omission; it's been filed as a bug since April 2011 and continues to attract attention. Your best option for getting this feature (besides forking it on GitHub or switching to another application) is to submit a comment at the Google Code site above. Hopefully with enough interest, this feature will make it back into the product.

The latest builds now include this feature, as of March 15 2012.

Official Download site: http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/downloads/list

The latest build (Currently March 26th 2012) includes this feature.