How to disable moving the cursor with the mouse

Question

I've been using Vim for decades (and Vi before it since around 1984.) I use it now on Linux. Somewhere along the line one behavior crept in that I'd like to disable: when I click in a window to move the focus, and the click happens to be in the body of the window, Vim moves the cursor to wherever the click landed. If the window is large, it's sometimes not obvious where the cursor was, and that can be important for what I'm trying to do.

I know I could try to click on the window border somewhere, and this wouldn't happen. But I'd rather not have to be that meticulous, especially when there are a lot of windows around. I also know there are other ways to change focus, but I don't want to cycle through every window on my 3-monitor workspace.

I'm running Ubuntu and Xubuntu, and have loaded Vim-gtk because I sometimes want to run full graphical, where I could live with this behavior. But I'm usually not in graphical mode.

I see there's a Vim-tiny that probably does not have this behavior, but I don't know what else I would lose.

I've looked through the setup stuff for the window manager and don't see anything relevant. The Vim man page doesn't have anything that jumped out at me either. My .vimrc doesn't seem to address the issue (but it's long and I may have forgotten/missed something.)

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Here's a heavy solution:

nnoremap <LeftMouse> ma<LeftMouse>`a

It will let the click go through (thus changing the focus), but make sure the cursor always goes back to where it was before the click was initiated.

Answer 2

From Vim Tips Wiki:

When you are using another application and select go back to Vim by clicking inside Vim's text area, it not only switches application focus to Vim, but it also moves the cursor to that location. If you don't want the cursor to move, put the following in your vimrc:

augroup NO_CURSOR_MOVE_ON_FOCUS
  au!
  au FocusLost * let g:oldmouse=&mouse | set mouse=
  au FocusGained * if exists('g:oldmouse') | let &mouse=g:oldmouse | unlet g:oldmouse | endif
augroup END

Although I am unable to test this on Linux, I've recently started using it on Windows, and it appears to do what you're asking for. (Note that somebody reported an issue with split windows, i.e. after :split, but I haven't observed it myself.)

Answer 3

You can set mouse= to disable mouse entirely, use set mouse=a to restore mouse behaviour. You can automatically enable/disable mouse only in terminal vim but not in GUI vim by checking for if has("gui"), or by putting your config in .gvimrc.

Alternatively, you can get into the habit of changing window using Alt-Tab instead of the mouse. As a side effect, this prepares your fingers to be in the keyboard to operate vim.

Another alternative, depending on your window manager, you can get into the habit of doing Alt-Click to focus a windows without changing the focus inside that window.

Answer 4

:nnoremap <Down> <Nop>

:nnoremap <Up> <Nop>

does the trick (in conjunction with :set mouse=). Of course, you can't use the arrow keys any more, but if you're using vim, you didn't care anyway. Edit: Need to this in insert mode too, so add the following:

:inoremap <Down> <Nop>

:inoremap <Up> <Nop>