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The scrollback buffer problem is annoying, but I just don't think there's a good solution to it. screen (and tmux) basically store their own scrollback. The ad

The scrollback buffer problem is annoying, but I just don't think there's a good solution to it. screen (and tmux) basically store their own scrollback. The advantage here is that you can then page through the line history on another terminal or even another computer. The downside is that that your terminal (xterm/iterm/whatever) has to decide what to show when you page up. It has no way to read screen's internal scrollback, so it can either show you old non-screen lines, or hide the scrollback entirely. Switching into/out of screen will just add to the confusion. (I think some terminals will hide the scrollback history when they spot the TTY in curses-style mode, and only bring it back when that process quits?) One other annoyance for me is the behaviour of scrollback with a command like 'less' or 'more'. If you are paging down through a file, then scroll back up, some terminals will show you earlier lines of the file you are viewing, while others show you 'pre-less' scrollback.

philh 11y ago
There may not be a good solution currently, but I don't believe that no good solution is possible even in theory. Which makes me wonder if the VT100 paradigm is holding us back. Like, if a VT100 understood the concept of tabs natively, it seems like this wouldn't be a problem. Screen could just map its windows onto VT100 tabs, and the terminal would know what to do with that. I don't know if adding tabs to VT100 emulators would be remotely feasible, or a good idea if it was, but I expect there's something in this space that would be an improvement on what we have.
- peteri 11y ago
  Eh. A real VT100 should understand tabs, you can set them with 'Esc H' oddly the DEC manuals don't say what the effect of resetting tabs would be (I'd guess it defaults to multiples of 8 characters).
  - yuubi 11y ago
    Not \x08 tabs, but tabs like recent firefox and chrome use (as if you had several terminal windows with separate ptys and screen contents, but all in one window-manager window).

philh 11y ago

There may not be a good solution currently, but I don't believe that no good solution is possible even in theory. Which makes me wonder if the VT100 paradigm is holding us back. Like, if a VT100 understood the concept of tabs natively, it seems like this wouldn't be a problem. Screen could just map its windows onto VT100 tabs, and the terminal would know what to do with that. I don't know if adding tabs to VT100 emulators would be remotely feasible, or a good idea if it was, but I expect there's something in this space that would be an improvement on what we have.

peteri 11y ago
Eh. A real VT100 should understand tabs, you can set them with 'Esc H' oddly the DEC manuals don't say what the effect of resetting tabs would be (I'd guess it defaults to multiples of 8 characters).
- yuubi 11y ago
  Not \x08 tabs, but tabs like recent firefox and chrome use (as if you had several terminal windows with separate ptys and screen contents, but all in one window-manager window).