Bug#683942: xterm: alternate screen scrolling

[Andrew Pimlott <andrew@pimlott.net>]

Package: xterm
Version: 278-1
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

I used gnome-terminal recently and noticed that using the mouse wheel
caused scrolling within apps like vim.  I thought that was strange,
because I disabled mouse support in vim.  It turns out gnome-terminal
has a feature called "alternate screen scrolling".  When you are in the
alternate screen, it translates the mouse wheel into three up or down
arrow presses.

This is obviously a hack, but I want it.  (I don't like enabling mouse
support in vim because it takes over the mouse entirely, and as far as I
understand there is no way for it to only take the wheel.)  I thought I
might be able to set up my own translations, but I don't think there is
a way to define translations that apply only in the alternate screen.

Is there another way for me to get this behavior?

Andrew

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages xterm depends on:
ii  libc6           2.13-33
ii  libfontconfig1  2.9.0-6
ii  libice6         2:1.0.8-2
ii  libtinfo5       5.9-10
ii  libutempter0    1.1.5-4
ii  libx11-6        2:1.5.0-1
ii  libxaw7         2:1.0.10-2
ii  libxft2         2.3.1-1
ii  libxmu6         2:1.1.1-1
ii  libxt6          1:1.1.3-1
ii  xbitmaps        1.1.1-1

Versions of packages xterm recommends:
ii  x11-utils  7.7~1

Versions of packages xterm suggests:
pn  xfonts-cyrillic  <none>

-- no debconf information