[plug] console scroll

[Cameron Patrick]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 10:29:25AM +0800, James Devenish wrote:

| 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.)

AIUI Linux's scrollback buffer is kept in spare pages of video memory,
and is lost when you switch VC's.  On any machine with remotely recent
video hardware, running X will allow you to have a much nicer display,
with higher resolution, higher refresh rate, nicer fonts, and the
ability to run X apps at the same time should you ever need to...

If you like the 'purity' of having your entire screen devoted to your
console and not having extraneous rubbish running, take a look at using
X with the ratpoison window manager... it's entirely keyboard
controlled, and in its default configuration, running ratpoison and an
xterm will look just like the text console.  Only better, cos you can
run Mozilla and Openoffice under it too :-)

| If it is installed, you invoke it as `screen` on the command line.

Or if you're like me, in your ~/.bashrc ;-)

Cameron.

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