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Re: mintty scroll to bottom


On 05/03/2012 5:05 AM, Lemke, Michael SZ/HZA-ZSW wrote:
On March 04, 2012 12:51 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Mar 2 20:20, Andy Koppe wrote:
On 2 March 2012 08:41, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Mar 1 20:43, Andy Koppe wrote:
On 29 February 2012 12:46, Lemke, Michael SZ/HZA-ZSW wrote:
What is the mintty equivalent to rxvt/xterm's

-si|+si
              Turn on/off scroll-to-bottom on TTY output inhibit;
              resource scrollTtyOutput has opposite effect.
There's no such option. Shift+End will get you back to the current
output after looking at something in the scrollback, as will any
keypress that sends something to the terminal.
Any chance to implement this?  Automatic scroll-to-bottom is a useful
feature, IMHO.
I disagree. The point of being able to scroll back to earlier output
is to read and perhaps copy something. When doing that, having the
scrollback jump back to the bottom without the user asking for it is
rather unhelpful. The Windows console does this, and I always found it
really frustrating.
THat's why this is an option in xterm.  Every use has another idea how
the terminal should behave in this regard, I guess.
I'd also appreciate very much implementing that option.  mintty is
promoted here as a replacement for rxvt but obviously lacks a functionality
I've come to depend on.  My use case is a terminal window in which I don't
do much but where a lot of background jobs regularly produce output.
A quick glance at the window tells me the current status of those jobs.
Not with mintty anymore.  Same with the classic use case tail -f logfile.
What you describe above sounds more like mintty allowing a visible "end of output" to scroll off the bottom without following it, a behavior I've never observed and which would arguably be a bug.

When I fire up something that produces copious output (gcc bootstrap, compile emacs, etc.) mintty scrolls to track end-of-output unless I purposefully scroll upward (in which case I'd prefer it to stay put long enough to read/copy the text rather than immediately jumping me back to end-of-output). Once the scrollbar is set back to bottom, it again tracks end-of-output. This can easily be checked with the following in mintty+bash:

$ for ((i=0; ; i=i+1)); do sleep .5; echo $i; done

Am I missing something? Or do your background jobs just produce output really infrequently compared to 'make all'? The latter is the only way I can see "reading stuff from the past" and "scroll-to-bottom" coexisting peacefully (because then you wouldn't [usually] get interrupted while reading, and it would be easy to miss the arrival of new output if the terminal isn't tracking it). But then, my long-running stuff always lives in a screen session anyway, where the terminal's scroll-to-bottom behavior is moot.

Disclaimer: I'm really not bothered if the option exists (disabled by default) in mintty, I just can't imagine a use case where it would be helpful and hoped those asking for the feature might be able to enlighten me (I've changed habits several times in the past after hearing peoples' answers to questions like this).

Ryan


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