screen scrollback

Hal Duston hald at kc.rr.com
Tue Nov 30 12:36:42 CST 2004


Jonathan Hutchins [mailto:hutchins at tarcanfel.org] wrote:
> 
> On Tue, November 30, 2004 10:29 am, Hal Duston said:
> 
> > Actually, I'm running screen under PuTTY right now, and while it does
> > in fact scrollback, it does _NOT_ scrollback over the currecnt screen
> > session, but rather it scrolls back to what was on the tty before I
> > started screen.
> 
> Interesting.  I was running the current version of putty 
> (downloaded this weekend from
> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html) 
> on Windows XP.

I just updated PuTTY here to 0.56, and I still see the same behaviour as
before.  The way that screen, (or vi, less, etc.) communicates with PuTTY
or xterm (or even the console TTY as this is all part of PuTTY's and xterm's
console emulation), is with terminfo escape codes.  There exists a single
alternate screen, and escape codes to facilitate switching between that
alternate and the primary screen only.  I wouldn't have expected any other
behaviour from either xterm or PuTTY, as "doing what seems correct" would
require the xterm or PuTTY client to maintain an unlimited number of
scrollback areas, one for each potential screen.  

--
Hal Duston




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