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Button-Event Mouse (1002)
Category: input · Baseline: modern · Tags: Xterm Extensions · Specification ↗
Button-event tracking (mode 1002) reports mouse button press, release, and motion while a button is held. More detailed than basic tracking (1000) but less verbose than all-motion tracking (1003).
Mode 1002 was one of xterm's steps from click-only reporting toward interactive mouse tracking. It reports drags only while a button is held, which is enough for selection, resize handles, and sliders without the volume of all-motion mode. The later SGR coordinate encoding made the same event model practical on large terminals.
How this is testedautomated
Enable button-event mouse tracking (
Enable button-event mouse tracking (
CSI ? 1002 h), check getMode("mouseTracking") returns true.The same probe runs against headless backends (via Termless) and real terminal apps (via a daemon launched in each terminal). This lets us distinguish parser correctness from rendering correctness.
Analysis2026-05-17
Supported by 13 of 14 backends (93%)
Terminal Applications
| Terminal | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | 3.6.9 | ✓ yes | |
| Ghostty | 1.3.1 | ✓ yes | |
| VS Code | ✓ yes | ||
| Warp | ✓ yes | ||
| Kitty | 0.46.2 | ✓ yes | Button-event mouse tracking not exposed via headless API |
| Cursor | ✓ yes | ||
| Terminal.app | ✓ yes |