Vim – How to Scroll Large Datafile While Keeping Header

lesspagerscrollingvim

Suppose I have some large datafile, which overflow the screen in both vertical and horizontal direction. How can I browse this file, while the header-lines stay on the screen?

For the moment, I am using less -S, so that I can nicely scroll my file horizontally and vertically. However, when scrolling down, the header lines obviously disappear. Is there a way to keep these using less?

An alternative is using vim in split-screen mode with :set nowrap. However, now if I scroll horizontally, the top window doesn't scroll in the same way (:windo set scrollbind only works for vertical scrolling as far as I know).

Best Answer

If you're familiar with vim, this is probably the best option for you. You can enable horizontal-scroll-bind-only by changing 'scrollopt':

set scrollopt=hor

So with vim -u NONE, you get the desired behavior with:

:set scrollopt=hor
:set nowrap
:1split
:windo set scrollbind

You may want to adjust 'sidescroll' and 'sidescrolloff' to change how many columns are skipped and how far from the edge skipping starts respectively.

Related Solutions

How to scroll while Holding Shift to copy in tmux

Probably you cannot. xterm (and the programs which act like it) makes a distinction between mouse operations with/without the shift modifier:

the unshifted operations can be programmed, i.e., an application can send an escape sequence telling xterm to send back escape sequences for each mouse click.
the unshifted operations cannot be programmed in this way. They are left as-is.

So tmux is not likely to be able to change this behavior. Further, the way the mouse buttons are used is (again, an old convention) in the way: one button acts to start a selection, another to extend the selection and the third to paste the selection. Some terminals may implement dragging if you hold down the extend-selection button.

But the wheel mouse is (really) much newer than the rest of the protocol, probably from the mid/late-1990s. In the mouse protocol, it sends fake button events, e.g., buttons 4 and 5. While a terminal could be implemented to extend a selection using the wheel mouse, tmux has no way to control that—and it likely would be built-in/not-configurable. If you are not seeing the desired behavior already, you probably cannot get it.

The distinction with shift is very old, and not confined to mouse operations: on some platforms, the page-up and page-down keys are setup to scroll the terminal when the shift modifier is added, while the unshifted keys may be read from an application.

Best Answer

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How to scroll while Holding Shift to copy in tmux

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