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Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:25:34 -0500
From: Ryan Johnson <ryan DOT johnson AT cs DOT utoronto DOT ca>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: mintty scroll to bottom
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On 05/03/2012 5:05 AM, Lemke, Michael SZ/HZA-ZSW wrote:
> On March 04, 2012 12:51 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> On Mar  2 20:20, Andy Koppe wrote:
>>> On 2 March 2012 08:41, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>> On Mar  1 20:43, Andy Koppe wrote:
>>>>> On 29 February 2012 12:46, Lemke, Michael  SZ/HZA-ZSW wrote:
>>>>>> What is the mintty equivalent to rxvt/xterm's
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -si|+si
>>>>>>               Turn on/off scroll-to-bottom on TTY output inhibit;
>>>>>>               resource scrollTtyOutput has opposite effect.
>>>>> There's no such option. Shift+End will get you back to the current
>>>>> output after looking at something in the scrollback, as will any
>>>>> keypress that sends something to the terminal.
>>>> Any chance to implement this?  Automatic scroll-to-bottom is a useful
>>>> feature, IMHO.
>>> I disagree. The point of being able to scroll back to earlier output
>>> is to read and perhaps copy something. When doing that, having the
>>> scrollback jump back to the bottom without the user asking for it is
>>> rather unhelpful. The Windows console does this, and I always found it
>>> really frustrating.
>> THat's why this is an option in xterm.  Every use has another idea how
>> the terminal should behave in this regard, I guess.
> I'd also appreciate very much implementing that option.  mintty is
> promoted here as a replacement for rxvt but obviously lacks a functionality
> I've come to depend on.  My use case is a terminal window in which I don't
> do much but where a lot of background jobs regularly produce output.
> A quick glance at the window tells me the current status of those jobs.
> Not with mintty anymore.  Same with the classic use case tail -f logfile.
What you describe above sounds more like mintty allowing a visible "end 
of output" to scroll off the bottom without following it, a behavior 
I've never observed and which would arguably be a bug.

When I fire up something that produces copious output (gcc bootstrap, 
compile emacs, etc.) mintty scrolls to track end-of-output unless I 
purposefully scroll upward (in which case I'd prefer it to stay put long 
enough to read/copy the text rather than immediately jumping me back to 
end-of-output). Once the scrollbar is set back to bottom, it again 
tracks end-of-output. This can easily be checked with the following in 
mintty+bash:

$ for ((i=0; ; i=i+1)); do sleep .5; echo $i; done

Am I missing something? Or do your background jobs just produce output 
really infrequently compared to 'make all'? The latter is the only way I 
can see "reading stuff from the past" and "scroll-to-bottom" coexisting 
peacefully (because then you wouldn't [usually] get interrupted while 
reading, and it would be easy to miss the arrival of new output if the 
terminal isn't tracking it). But then, my long-running stuff always 
lives in a screen session anyway, where the terminal's scroll-to-bottom 
behavior is moot.

Disclaimer: I'm really not bothered if the option exists (disabled by 
default) in mintty, I just can't imagine a use case where it would be 
helpful and hoped those asking for the feature might be able to 
enlighten me (I've changed habits several times in the past after 
hearing peoples' answers to questions like this).

Ryan


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