http://bitheap.org/mouseterm/

Use MouseTerm (and do make sure to install SIMBL first!) and scrolling will work like a charm, even remote, using Mac Terminal.

You need to fully quit the Terminal application (Command+Q) and then launch it again after installing MouseTerm.

And if you re using iTerm, add this to your vimrc

:set mouse=a

This is an old question, but a top hit on google, so I feel compelled to provide an updated answer.

Running OSX El Capitan 10.11, vim mouse and trackpad scrolling just worked(TM) for me in Terminal.app by default. However occasionally the mouse/trackpad input stopped manipulating the vim buffer, and started scrolling the terminal buffer. The answer was Command+R or Menu View --> Allow Mouse Reporting. Turning that on allowed the mouse/trackpad scroll operations to move the cursor in vim.

• Termanal Menu > View > Allow Mouse Reporting
• Terminal Menu > Preferences > Keyboard > Scroll alternate screen

If the mouse functionalities still do not work properly take a look at my answer in this post How to let vim behave on Mac OS X as on Ubuntu?, just add to your .vimrc

set ttymouse=xterm2

You can read this article, but I m pretty sure since the default terminal in Mac OS X has a built-in scrollbar, the mousewheel commands automatically go to it. You could definitely use gVim as suggested in the previous answer. I find that I don t generally want to use the mouse in Vim though as it takes my hands off the keyboard.

I just use 50j to go down and 50k to go up. Not exactly scrolling, but it works pretty well.

Make sure the terminal is xterm & not ansi in Terminal Menu > Preferences > Profiles > Advanced. I accidentally broke scrolling by changing the term type in a naive effort to get coloring to work over ssh.

Use gVim, which gives you a text editing environment in a window you can scroll. Terminal is not involved when using gVim.

I m using xterm in X11 (XQuartz 2.3.4) and vim works very fine with mouse and also suport 256 colors.

Here is the ~/.Xresources I use to make my xterm nicer in X11:

XTerm*faceName: Lucida Sans Typewriter Regular
XTerm*faceSize: 9
XTerm*utf8: 1

xterm*saveLines: 1000
xterm*jumpScroll: true
!xterm*awaitInput: true
!xterm*multiScroll: true

XTerm*scrollBar: false
xterm*scrollbar*thickness: 16
xterm*rightScrollBar: true

XTerm*foreground: white
XTerm*background: grey10
!XTerm*background: black
XTerm*cursorColor: yellow

xterm*visualBell: false

xterm*loginShell: true

Little tips, to remove the bell sound in X11 s xterm type this command:

xset b 0

I would recommend using iTerm - it has so many advantages over Terminal eg Mouse support, 256 colors, sensible copy and paste (auto-copy, word/url selection with double click, middle click paste)...

When using iTerm create a .vimrc file (if not already there) in your home folder and add the line:

:set mouse=a

Scrolling down in vim to view a file works after this.