[plug] console scroll

James Devenish devenish at guild.uwa.edu.au
Thu Nov 27 10:29:25 WST 2003


Hi,

In message <6.0.0.22.0.20031127092728.01b253d8 at pop.ozemail.com.au>
on Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 09:29:34AM +0800, smclevie wrote:
> I'm using the basic console.  (No GUI loaded.  X not loaded.)
> 
> I am wanting a greater history on the <shift><pg_up> key sequence.

If you can, avoid using the consoles for regular work with scrolling
support. Text consoles are a pretty low-level kernel activity. For a
demonstration of the limitations of relying on console scrollback, try
out the fact that you can switch between multiple virtual consoles (by
using special key combinations -- depends on your hardware platform).
You will probably find that if you switch from one virtual console to
another, you will lose scroll history. (Having said that, Linux is
probably geared towards things like large console scrollback support,
which you often don't see with other UNIX-like operating systems.)

An alternative is to use virtual terminals (you won't need to resort to
X11, though that would also work). Because I personally use `screen` a
lot, I would use it to solve this problem. `screen` is an official GNU
programme. If it is installed, you invoke it as `screen` on the command
line. You can configure its scrollback history to an arbitrary number of
lines. You also use it to 'lock' your terminal, perform copy-and-paste
and other things. The only trick is that it might not be as easy as
"<shift><pg_up>".


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