MacOS Sierra scrolling behavior in Terminal is really weird

macosscrollingterminaltrackpad

After upgrading to macOS Sierra, one of the things that bugs me is the altered scrolling behavior in Terminal, using the Trackpad.

See screencast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUWO6-oOLoA

When scrolling using the Trackpad (second part of the video), the scrolling is very sensitive and jittery. There's no way to scroll just one line of text for instance.

Any insight into this behavior, or way to revert to the previous one?

Best Answer

This has been bothering me all during the Sierra betas and I couldn't get anyone to address it.

The issue is that there's a minimum scrolling speed now. You can really see it if you use inertia scrolling. You let go and it slows down but then when it gets to a certain speed, it never goes slower than that. And then it stops abruptly at the same time it would have if it had been slowing down normally.

What you're seeing is a side-effect of this. And I haven't found a solution yet.

And this scrolling behavior is ONLY in Terminal as far as I can tell.

Go to bugreport.apple.com. I am filing more reports.

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You should surround your non-printing characters (in this case, your ANSI escape sequences) with bash escape sequences: \[ and \]. That way bash will know the enclosed characters are not visible, ie. they do not take space, ie. they should not be included in the word-length calculation used by the line-wrapper.

in other words change your PS1 definition:

export PS1="\e[31m\u\e[0m@\e[34m\h\e[33m\w\n \$ \e[0m "

… to:

export PS1="\[\e[31m\]\u\[\e[0m\]@\[\e[34m\]\h\[\e[33m\]\w\n \$ \[\e[0m\] "

And here's the same PS1 value, for human–reading only, with perhaps improved readability (ANSI-escapes in the lower row, bash escapes in the middle and printing characters in the upper row.)

          \u          @          \h          \w\n \$
\[      \]  \[     \] \[      \]  \[      \]        \[     \] 
  \e[31m      \e[0m     \e[34m      \e[33m            \e[0m

Best Answer

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