Mouse and trackpad in Skink: click, select, scroll

The mouse works in Skink without any setup. Click to place the cursor, drag to select, scroll with the wheel. Alt+click adds another cursor, and Shift+wheel or a sideways trackpad swipe scrolls long lines.

Click, drag and scroll in the editor

Do this	Gets you
Click	Move the cursor there
Drag	Select
Alt+click	Add a cursor there, or remove one that is there
Wheel	Scroll three lines at a time
Shift+wheel	Scroll sideways
Trackpad swipe left / right	Scroll sideways

Scrolling sideways

Sideways scrolling moves the text but keeps the line numbers in place. The view stays scrolled until the cursor moves.

When lines are wider than the view, a thin thumb on the bottom row shows where you are. Keyboard users can bind ScrollLeft and ScrollRight.

Clickable parts of the window

Click	Does
A tab	Switch to it
A tab’s x, or middle-click a tab	Close it (asks first if it has unsaved changes)
A fold mark in the gutter	Open the fold
A git change mark in the gutter	Peek at the change: s stage, u unstage, r revert, Esc
A sticky header at the top	Jump to that block’s first line
“Accept ours | theirs | both” on a merge conflict	Resolve that conflict block
A pane	Focus it
The file tree	Focus the tree (clicking the editor or a tab hands the keys back)

Resize panes and the file tree

• Split panes: drag the divider between two panes, or drag a pane’s title row.
• File tree: drag its right border.

The keyboard equivalents are Alt+= / Alt+- for panes (or :growsplit / :shrinksplit) and < / > in the tree. See Splits and docks.

The mouse in terminal tabs

• Programs that use the mouse, such as htop, lazygit or an AI CLI, get your clicks and the wheel.
• Otherwise the wheel scrolls the terminal’s scrollback.
• Ctrl+click on a file:line[:col] in the output opens that file at that line.

See Terminal tabs.

Select text the terminal way

Skink captures the mouse, so a plain drag selects inside Skink rather than in your terminal.

Most terminals let you hold Shift while dragging to bypass that and use the terminal’s own selection. On macOS it is often Option or Fn, depending on the terminal.

Inside Skink, prefer Ctrl+C: it also reaches your clipboard over SSH.

Note

There is no double-click to select a word yet. Use Ctrl+D to select the word at the cursor, and Alt+O (or :expand) to grow the selection to the enclosing syntax node.

Mouse not working?

• Over tmux, mouse events reach Skink only if tmux passes them on. Check your tmux mouse setting.
• Some very old terminals do not report the mouse at all. Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, iTerm2, Windows Terminal, GNOME Terminal and Alacritty all do.