Treat terminal more like an editor

[rgbkrk]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the feature

When editing a shell command, I'd love to be able to click into the middle of the text to position my cursor.

Most terminal emulators don't support this, except for Warp and Kitty. I would love for the feel of the terminal to match the seamless fluid feel of the editor.

The following is what I think we need for this feature

1. Mouse-based cursor positioning

   • Allow users to click anywhere in the command line to position the cursor
   • Support selecting text with mouse drag

2. Full text editor capabilities for command input

   • Multi-line editing support
   • Copy/paste functionality
   • Multiple cursors and selections

3. Visual enhancements

   • Change cursor style from block to vertical bar (|)
   • Implement syntax highlighting for shell commands

4. Maintain shell compatibility

   • Ensure compatibility with popular shells (Bash, Zsh, Fish)
   • Implement hooks for shell integration (precmd, preexec)

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

Here's a totally fake way to show it

Area.mp4

I'd love if the cursor was a | too instead of a block.

[notpeter]

Nifty. I wonder exactly how Warp and Kitty have implemented this.

Native MacOS Terminal, Alacritty and others have some support for mouse events (via ANSI events, google mouse "\e[?1003h" for more). A simple test to test:

brew install
dialog --yesno Testing 10 30

[rgbkrk]

There's two main articles from Warp on how they handle input as well as how terminals are generally implemented:

• Why is the Terminal Input So Weird
• How Warp Works

Based on this, I'll update the issue with what I think we need.

[rgov]

Seems like this is close enough to my feature request: on macOS Terminal.app, you can position the cursor by option-clicking. I rely on this feature heavily. I'd like the behavior to match so it's not jarring switching between different apps. I think VS Code is also consistent here.

[notpeter]

I'm moving this to a discussion, but preserving the scoped request for option-click caret placement as:

• Support option-click for moving input cursor in terminal #25481

[asqarslanov]

Maybe, instead of implementing a new terminal in-house, Zed can make use of existing implementations. The libghostty library looks promising.