Clicking in ssh terminal causes 'junk' characters [0;83;32M0] after tmux

Question

Both my local and remote are Ubuntu 18, though I have seen it in 16 as well.

I establish a ssh to my remote server, start tmux (2.1.3), something causes the pipe to break. When I ssh back in, but before I start tmux, whenever I click in the terminal screen, it writes a bunch of junk to the buffer, like

0;38;15M 0;38;15m 0;60;12M0;60;12m0;56;14M0;56;14m0;56;14M0;56;14m0;54;13M0;54;13m0;54;13M0;54;13m

I've deduced that these numbers are of the form N;X;YM, where N is 0, 1, 2... for left click, middle, right click, X and Y are proportional to the location of the mouse click, M is mouse down, m is mouse up.

Clearly, this is some kind of in-band signalling, and I am pretty sure it relates to option mouse on. But where is it coming from? Is it just a Tmux thing, an ssh thing, or a Gnome terminal thing?

score 44 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 12 '19 at 19:24

44

These are escape sequences that tell tmux about mouse events. Because tmux was disconnected unexpectedly it didn't get a chance to turn mouse mode off so the terminal is still sending them even though no application wants them. You can run "reset" to turn it off.

answered Jun 12 '19 at 19:24

Nicholas Marriott

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Cool! That reset trick was handy. So is this something in the underlying TTY spec to pick up mouse events? I imagine the terminal emulator must be picking up the mouse events and converting them to the escape codes? – DeusXMachina Jun 12 '19 at 19:31
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Right the terminal emulator gets mouse events from X or whatever and sends them to the application (if it requests them). – Nicholas Marriott Jun 12 '19 at 20:20
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The stuff you are seeing is SGR mouse mode, there are several others. It's in here somewhere https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html – Nicholas Marriott Jun 12 '19 at 20:30
Ah, precisely what I was looking for! Not at all surprised X is behind this. So cool. – DeusXMachina Jun 12 '19 at 21:01
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run reset or tput reset – Shital Shah Dec 14 '19 at 10:07

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 11 '25 at 20:14

I was seeing this problem when I was using tmux on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) while also using ssh. When my ssh session was interrupted, even moving my mouse cursor over the affected window would cause the window to spew out escape codes.

Unfortunately, the reset command did not work for me. (I can't remember if I tried tput reset .)

A simple trick that worked for me was to start up vim and then immediately quit it. In fact, I used this command to invoke vim and immediately quit, so that I didn't even have to interact with vim at all:

vim +q

This starts vim and quits, instantly returning you to the command line. Although there is not enough time for you to interact with vim, it does allow vim to do its own terminal reconfiguration and fix whatever is wrong with the terminal.

Clicking in ssh terminal causes 'junk' characters [0;83;32M0] after tmux

2 Answers2