On at least x86 PCs, Linux text consoles ('TTY' consoles or 'virtual consoles') support some surprising things. One of them is doing some useful stuff with your mouse, if you run an additional daemon such as gpm or the more modern consolation . This is supported on both framebuffer consoles and old 'VGA' text consoles. The experience is fairly straightforward; you install and activate one of the daemons, and afterward you can wave your mouse around, select and paste text, and so on. How it works and what you get is not as clear, and since I recently went diving into this area for reasons , I'm going to write down what I now know before I forget it (with a focus on how consolation works).

The quick summary is that the console TTY's mouse support is broadly like a terminal emulator. With a mouse daemon active, the TTY will do "copy and paste" selection stuff on its own. A mouse aware text mode program can put the console into a mode where mouse button presses are passed through to the program, just as happens in xterm or other terminal emulators.

The simplest TTY mode is when a non-mouse-aware program or shell is active, which is to say a program that wouldn't try to intercept mouse actions itself if it was run in a regular terminal window and would leave mouse stuff up to the terminal emulator. In this mode, your mouse daemon reads mouse input events and then uses sub-options of the TIOCLINUX ioctl to inject activities into the TTY, for example telling it to 'select' some text and then asking it to paste that selection to some file descriptor (normally the console itself, which delivers it to whatever foreground program is taking terminal input at the time).

(In theory you can use the mouse to scroll text back and forth, but in practice that was removed in 2020, both for the framebuffer console and for the VGA console . If I'm reading the code correctly, a VGA console might still have a little bit of scrollback support depending on how much spare VGA RAM you have for your VGA console size. But you're probably not using a VGA console any more.)

The other mode the console TTY can be in is one where some program has used standard xterm-derived escape sequences to ask for xterm-compatible "mouse tracking", which is the same thing it might ask for in a terminal emulator if it wanted to handle the mouse itself. What this does in the kernel TTY console driver is set a flag that your mouse daemon can query with TIOCL_GETMOUSEREPORTING; the kernel TTY driver still doesn't directly handle or look at mouse events. Instead, consolation (or gpm) reads the flag and, when the flag is set, uses the TIOCL_SELMOUSEREPORT sub-sub-option to TIOCLINUX's TIOCL_SETSEL sub-option to report the mouse position and button presses to the kernel (instead of handling mouse activity itself). The kernel then turns around and sends mouse reporting escape codes to the TTY, as the program asked for.

(As I discovered, we got a CVE this year related to this , where the kernel let too many people trigger sending programs 'mouse' events. See the stable kernel commit message for details.)

A mouse daemon like consolation doesn't have to pay attention to the kernel's TTY 'mouse reporting' flag. As far as I can tell from the current Linux kernel code, if the mouse daemon ignores the flag it can keep on doing all of its regular copy and paste selection and mouse button handling. However, sending mouse reports is only possible when a program has specifically asked for it; the kernel will report an error if you ask it to send a mouse report at the wrong time.

(As far as I can see there's no notification from the kernel to your mouse daemon that someone changed the 'mouse reporting' flag. Instead you have to poll it; it appears consolation does this every time through its event loop before it handles any mouse events.)

PS: Some documentation on console mouse reporting was written as a 2020 kernel documentation patch ( alternate version ) but it doesn't seem to have made it into the tree. According to various sources, eg , the mouse daemon side of things can only be used by actual mouse daemons, not by programs, although programs do sometimes use other bits of TIOCLINUX's mouse stuff.

PPS: It's useful to install a mouse daemon on your desktop or laptop even if you don't intend to ever use the text TTY. If you ever wind up in the text TTY for some reason, perhaps because your regular display environment has exploded, having mouse cut and paste is a lot nicer than not having it.