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Using screen and GLTerm is great, but ...
Authored by: kjaleel on Nov 26, '03 05:35:29AM

*sorry for reposting this*

the only problem I have with screen is I cannot figure out how to make it retain the history of past scrolled lines in *all* windows it has open.

for example, lets assume I have two windows open and there is activity happening in both (lines scrolling by). If I now switch from the current window to another one and try to scroll up to see previous lines that have scrolled by, I can't! It forgets those lines and only shows lines from the window I just switched from.

I really hope someone can tell me how to do this, it's the only thing I haven't managed to figure out even from the man pages. iTerm is really slow for me as well and the combination of GLTerm and screen is just "perfect".



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Using screen and GLTerm is great, but ...
Authored by: dpwk on Nov 26, '03 05:29:31PM

I've used screen for a decade, and I don't believe there is any way to accomplish this. The reason is that the scrollback buffer is outside of screen's control: a (any) Terminal application just says to the UNIX host "Hi, I have a text window 80 (or so) columns wide and 44 (or so) rows high, tell me what you'd like to display in it!" Any text within the window is available to UNIX (and screen), and anything even one line above the window* is gone forever from UNIX's awareness- it exists only as a memory structure in whatever terminal emulator you are using- the usual interface to it is the scrollbar.

When screen swaps the text on your screen as you attach to a new session, it has no way of swapping the text in your scrollback buffer. This is indeed the big drawback of screen, and not one that can be easily circumvented. (I suppose you could somehow convince some terminal emulators to give you a window say 500 lines high, but that would lead to really lousy performance and most likely some bizarre display problems.)


Ultimately, your scrollback ends up being a series of fragments of the screens you have recently visited. Tis the nature of the beast.

*the only exception here is this: if you type screen into a window Y rows high, and then later reattach to the session (screen -x) in a window that is fewer than Y rows high, screen will still attempt to provide those rows that were present in the first window from which you launched screen. Same goes for width of the window. If you do the opposite and reattach with a larger window, the original vertical size of the screen will be indicated by a dashed line at the bottom of the new window.

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gigabling megashiznit



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screen history
Authored by: a1291762 on Nov 27, '03 08:51:01AM

Ahh grasshopper... You are trying to view screen's history from the terminal. This is impossible. You should instead view screen's history with screen itself. It does keep history.

The way I generally do it is to go into "copy mode" ^A[ and scroll up (page up works too) from there. Enter twice to leave copy mode.

I'm sure there's a better way to do it but that's what I've always done.



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screen history
Authored by: dpwk on Dec 01, '03 09:38:44PM

OMG that is so SO cool. I couldn't be happier to be proven wrong!

Hats off to you and macosxhints.com (which, have you noticed, comes up rather a lot in random unix searches..?)

best and happy ^A[-ing,
David

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gigabling megashiznit



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