Bug#730512: libvte9: Unnecessarily stealing shift+up/down in the alternate buffer

[Tim Marston]

Package: libvte9
Version: 1:0.28.2-5
Severity: normal
Tags: patch

Dear Maintainer,

When in the alternate buffer, scrolling is not possible (and is
disabled, in fact).  But the Shift+Up and Shift+Down key presses, which
usually scroll the screen up and down by a single line, are still
stolen by libvte.  This deprives applications that use the alternate
buffer of them.

By way of an example, you can use C-S-up and C-S-down in emacs to
select blocks of text (just as C-up and C-down are bound to move to
previous/next paragraph).  This is no longer possible in any terminal
that uses libvte9, such as xfce4-terminal.

Since the alternate buffer doesn't provide scrolling anyway, it would
seem reasonable to pass these key presses to the terminal in this case.
This behaviour can be seen demonstrated by mintty (a Windows-based
terminal emulator) and works very nicely.  It works so nicely, in fact,
that it wasn't until I realised I couldn't use C-S-up/down in emacs at
home that I realised I had been using these key presses at work for
different purposes in the normal/alternate buffers!

The accompanying patch causes libvte9 not to process the Shift+Up/Down
key presses when the alternate screen is being used.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.11-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages libvte9 depends on:
ii  libatk1.0-0          2.10.0-2
ii  libc6                2.17-96
ii  libcairo2            1.12.16-2
ii  libfontconfig1       2.11.0-1
ii  libfreetype6         2.4.9-1.1
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0   2.28.2-1
ii  libglib2.0-0         2.36.4-1
ii  libgtk2.0-0          2.24.22-1
ii  libncurses5          5.9+20130608-1
ii  libpango-1.0-0       1.36.0-1
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0  1.36.0-1
ii  libpangoft2-1.0-0    1.36.0-1
ii  libtinfo5            5.9+20130608-1
ii  libvte-common        1:0.28.2-5
ii  libx11-6             2:1.6.2-1
ii  libxext6             2:1.3.2-1

libvte9 recommends no packages.

libvte9 suggests no packages.

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