Is it possible to scroll faster than PgUp/PgDown in tmux

scrollingtmux

I have approximately 400k lines of output to scroll in tmux.
How can I speed up the pace of scroll in copy mode?
Alternatively, how can I transfer all the (already generated) output content to a file?

Best Answer

I'm not entirely sure I understand the first part of the question:

If you want to scroll faster than one page up at a time, you can add a repeat count to page-up: in copy mode do M-10 PageUp (with emacs key bindings) or 10C-b (with vi key bindings) to scroll up 10 pages at a time. However, I'd rather use the search functionality C-s and C-r for emacs keys and / and ? with vi keys.

To capture the entire history of the pane I would do (needs tmux 2.0 or later):

$ tmux capture-pane -S - -E - # save the history in a paste buffer

In case you have an older version of tmux, give something like -S -400000 as an argument to tmux capture-pane.

You can then paste the history wherever you want with prefix-]. To save the history to a file, do:

$ tmux save-buffer /tmp/myhistory # save the history in /tmp/myhistory

I have the line

bind-key C command-prompt -p 'save history to:' \
         -I '/tmp/tmux-%F_%H_%M.log \
         capture-pane -S -; save-buffer %1'

in my $HOME/.tmux.conf (which I adapted from this answer). This prompts me where I want to save the entire history with a reasonable default.

If you wish to save some memory, delete it using $ tmux delete-buffer.

Related Solutions

How to send-key to break out of scroll mode in tmux

You can send literal escape (and newline) with ANSI-C quoting (there's more about that here), e.g. to send escape to 0:0:

tmux send-keys -t 0:0 $'\e'

For your mapping, assuming I understand it correctly, you could do something like this:

map  <F5> :silent !tmux send-keys -t 0:0 $'\e'"python"$'\n'<CR>

Note that the escape will always be sent, so to work around the issue of the shell receiving the escape, you could send an extra newline:

map  <F5> :silent !tmux send-keys -t 0:0 $'\e'$'\n'"python"$'\n'<CR>

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

Related Solutions

How to send-key to break out of scroll mode in tmux

How to scroll while Holding Shift to copy in tmux

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