ITerm2 -> ssh -> gnu screen -> split window: scroll wheel not working

gnu-screeniterm2sshterminal

I'm using Mac OS X as a workstation. With iTerm2, I connect to a remote host (Ubuntu Server) using this command:

ssh -t user@host screen -D -R -R

But I can't get the scroll wheel to work correctly, especially when using split windows. When I'm scrolling up I expect to see the scrollback buffer of the current split window; instead, the entire iTerm2 scrollback buffer goes up, revealing part of the output of the commands before the ssh.

Putting termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@ on ~/.screenrc, as suggested here, both in local and remote home directories, does not change the behavior.

The TERM environment variable is xterm-256color in both consoles.

Best Answer

The related posting Mac OS X terminal and GNU screen scrollback essentially advises you to suppress switching to the alternate screen of xterm. While in the alternate screen, you would not necessarily be able to use the scroll-wheel to see xterm's scrollback. A program running in xterm would only see the escape sequences if it enables the xterm mouse protocol.

By default, screen does not do this. It does have a setting which enables the mouse protocol, called mousetrack:

This command determines whether screen will watch for mouse clicks. When this command is enabled, regions that have been split in various ways can be selected by pointing to them with a mouse and left- clicking them. Without specifying on or off, the current state is displayed. The default state is determined by the "defmousetrack" command.

But

this is a fairly new feature (mentioned in Mouse in screen(1) on the Linux console?)
its description does not hint that it will help with scrolling in a window

Instead (see the first couple of links), some users have altered the xterm configuration to send screen-commands as the result of the scrolling wheel. A drawback to doing that is that it works only for the combination of xterm+screen.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to prevent gnu screen capturing the mouse

Press Ctrl+A on the keyboard and press Esc.

Press the Up and Down arrow keys or the PgUp and PgDn keys to scroll through previous output.

Press Esc to exit scrollback mode.

In screen it is done this way because each virtual terminal has its own scrollback buffer.

So I don't think you'll be able to do it the way you want to do it using screen. I have heard that it is possible to use the mouse to scroll using byobu instead of screen. Frankly either byobu or tmux are better IMHO. I prefer tmux, never tried to scroll in it though.

Macos – How to trigger a notification from a remote terminal in OS X

You have not specified what kind of notification you want nor what OS the remote server is running so I am going to have to make some assumptions here. I will assume you don't really care what type of notification it is as long as you are notified and that the remote server is running some flavor of *nix.

Send yourself an email. If sendmail is configured on the server, you could do
```
./long_process && echo "Job done" | sendmail pnj@yourdomain.com
```
ssh back to your local machine (assuming this is possible) and make it talk to you. See here for more cool ways of making OSX beep at you.
```
./long_process && ssh you@local.ip say "Yo! All done"
```
or
```
./long_process && ssh you@local.ip terminal-notifier -message "Job finished!" -title "Info"
```
If you are connecting from a dynamic IP and you have configured your router so that you can ssh to that dynamic IP, you can do this (assuming you are only currently connected from your remote machine):
```
ip=$(who | grep $USER | perl -lne 's/\$(.+?)\$\s*$//; print "$1"' | tail -n 1) &&
 ./long_process && ssh you@$ip terminal-notifier -message "Job finished!" -title "Info"
```
You can set up password-less ssh in the normal way. It should not be affected by the dynamic IP. Once you have done so, the code above will work.
Use pushover and send a notification to your Android or iOS device (if you have one)
```
./long_process && pushover.pl "All done"
```

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to prevent gnu screen capturing the mouse

Macos – How to trigger a notification from a remote terminal in OS X

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