Mouse-hovering over 'mouse-face' overlays/regions on a TTY Emacs

[João Távora]

Hi all,

Lately I've become a fan of Emacs -nw (or TTY Emacs as some know it) [1]

Recently, I've noticed that even mouse-triggered menus are supported and
work surprisingly well when the mouse pointer enters the window of the
terminal emulator which is running Emacs.  Really great work!  I've also
noticed that the `help-echo` that I place in a overlay is also correctly
triggered by hovering my mouse over that overlay.  All of this happens
out-of-the-box with little or no configuration (that I'm aware of), both
in the urxvt terminal emulator on GNU/Linux and using iTerm2 or Terminal
on Mac OS.

The only thing that's now sorely missing is the temporary highlighting
with 'mouse-face'.  Doesn't it make sense to also support this?  How
would I go about adding this feature to Emacs master?  Or is it somehow
available already via a configuration switch that I'm not aware of?
It'd really help in my new Emacs extension.

Thanks in advance,
João

[1] I've learned to live with the limitations in certain keybindings.
Plus, the 'emacsclient' integration is really hard to beat, especially
with a script that I've adapted from Phil Jackson's almost
lost-in-the-internet Emacs hacks website:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070703163718/http://www.shellarchive.co.uk/Emacs.html

Ping me if you'd like to see my version.