Re: Building an emacs to use the mouse in the linux console

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:16:25 +0200 (CEST)
> From: address@hidden
> 
> I'm trying build an emacs binary that will let me use the mouse when running 
> in the Linux console. I'm running Fedora 16 (LXDE spin), I installed gpm, and 
> I compiled Emacs 24.1 from source, but copy-paste is not working. I can use 
> the mouse to select text, but when trying to paste I get a message saying 
> "Symbol's function definition is void: x-get-selection-internal".

This is expected: the GPM support on a TTY does not include copy/paste
feature.  No one wrote the code to do that.  Patches are welcome.

> When building emacs, it first complained that I was running X but had no X 
> development libraries. So I configured it with the '--without-x' option, and 
> at the end of the 'configure' run it said emacs would use '-lgpm'. So I'm 
> puzzled by the 'x-' function, do I need X libraries to use the mouse ?

No, you don't need X.  It's just that, for historical reasons, many
functions related to GUI features have names that start with "x-".

> The emacs 23.3 that comes with Fedora is able to copy-paste in the console, 
> but of course, I don't know how they built it. What's the right way to go 
> about this ?

Sorry, I don't know.  Maybe someone else could help.  Also, the value
of the variable system-configuration-options might reveal something
about the way Emacs was configured, and running ldd on the executable
will show which shared libraries it uses.  Maybe that will give a
clue.