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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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