screen scrollback

[Brian Kelsay]

What's the problem?  You ask screen to connect to a session of some sort with another PC and of course it should control the buffer of information flowing from that session.  The xterm is just a conduit or environment for processing at that point.  You could just as easily call screen from a run line (ctl-f2 in KDE, I believe) and not really launch a terminal first.  The same happens in ssh when you adjust the environment variables.  You've used *nix systems for a while, why is this a mystery?

The reason Putty does what you expect, is that it completely overrides all control of the terminal window it appears in.  It always launches a new window and takes complete control over it.  In an xterm, you can escape out of screen and run other programs or push it to the background and resume it later.  I don't generally do that, but you can.  It also seems that you are making note of Putty having control over screen, which is running within the Putty terminal.  Same reason, Putty assumes full control over the actions within the window, unlike the *nix way of allowing a modicum of control to the running program.  You will probably find that if you make the buffer for screen larger than that specified by Putty, that you will be able to scrollback further than expected.  You will reach the limits of the larger buffer in screen itself.   Clear as mud, right?

Wouldn't it be nice if some people gave answers instead of constant complaints about their tools?  As always, if you think a feature is lacking in some tool or not working properly, send a bug report or email to the developers of that tool.  You may find that it is working exactly as intended or that they think you have a good idea and they will add the requested feature.  Good luck getting a big software house to make changes for a single user.


Brian Kelsay

>>> Jonathan Hutchins <> 11/30/04 07:53AM >>>

Once again, I think we've gone off on tangents without attention to the 
original thread.

The problem is that when running screen in a terminal window, screen tends to 
intercept the scrollback buffer.   This means that whatever you've configured 
for the terminal program is often irrelevant, as is the terminal program's 
normal scrollback function.

While the ability to use screen's buffer-edit function does give you a 
scrollback, it also transforms the expected, accustomed behavior of the 
terminal; the ease of scrolling back with a mouse wheel or familiar keys.

Somehow, putty overcomes this, and manages to buffer and allow scrollback even 
within screen sessions.  Wouldn't it be nice if common Linux/Xwindows 
terminal programs did as good a job of integrating with this common Linux 
utility?