this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was inherent to the terminal that you can't position the cursor and select text using the mouse, and also inherent that there are not right-click menus.
If you don't want to use a mouse in your code editor that's a valid preference, but these are very different styles of programs and exist in separate categories. Personally I was using Atom before I was using VSCodium, and I really like most design choices of the latter, it's basically everything I always wanted an IDE to be like. Don't want to stop using the mouse.
If you have htop installed, run it in a terminal and click, for instance, the column headers.
There may be terminals for which that is a limitation, but with neovim in konsole, I can (left) click to move the cursor or select text and right-click to get a contextual menu.
Separately, the TUI libary we use for RESTMan is Brick and does support mouse events. IIRC we only support mouse-wheel scrolling, but there's a lot more that is possible.
So, I think it might worth your time to try some TUI alternatives to your GUI environment.
Your larger point that TUI can't fully replace GUI stands, at least IMO. Even for plain text formats (e.g. dotty) that I want to edit with a fixed-width font, an image (pre)view can be essential to some tasks. I don't usually find that's true for coding tasks, but design docs often benefit from charts.
Helix, just as Kakoune before it, supports multiple cursor selections, even off-screen. 👍 Mouse selections are also not a problem. NeoVim also has support for mouse selection.
Feel free to try it out! Setting up LSPs requires some setup work, but if you just want to try out the editing paradigm, you can just try to edit a plain text file to get a feel for it.
Programms can print special codes to position the cursor wherever and they can also enable mouse events. Helix does support selecting with mouse