ncurses applications (vim, less) overwrite scrollback history

By florian.wo... on November 27, 2010 14:30 (imported from Google Code)

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What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. fill the scrollback buffer (run ls a few times)
2. open a file in less or vim
3. quit less/vim
4. scroll to previous page

What is the expected output?
intact scrollback history. iterm should disable scrollback when the ncurses application grabs the terminal display.

What do you see instead?
the scrollback history of the previos page is overwritten with the contents of the ncurses display.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
svn rev 378, 10.6.4

best wishes.

Comment 1 by lazy... on November 27, 2010 22:00

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Having voted for this, I should mention that this is expected behaviour.

If I scroll upwards using screen or tmux scroll keys I get the scrollback without the ncurses stuff.

I had not thought of that as being a workaround until this moment, but I don't use terminals seriously without using screen/tmux...

Checking...

Comment 2 by gnach... on November 30, 2010 19:20

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(No comment has been entered for this change)

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Labels: Type: Defect, Type: Enhancement

Comment 3 by florian.wo... on December 02, 2010 09:55

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Thanks for looking into this. BTW: There is no such problem with the old iTerm 0.10.

Comment 4 by meta... on January 13, 2011 20:42

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In the iterm 0.10 I did have to "tmux set -g terminal-overrides xterm*:smcup@rmcup@" to get correct scrollback behavior.

Comment 5 by gnach... on February 18, 2011 06:19

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(No comment has been entered for this change)

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Labels: Priority: Medium, Priority: High

Comment 6 by gnach... on March 13, 2011 23:02

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This issue was closed by revision r672.

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Status: Fixed

Comment 7 by rec...@yahoo.com on April 17, 2011 07:22

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Thanks for addressing this issue. I had the same problem ever since. However, the behavior - with "Disable save/restore alternate screen" - is still not what I would expect and differs from the old iTerm or Terminal.app. When exiting a ncurses application in the latter two the terminal prompt is advanced by exactly one line. In the current iTerm 0.20.20110413, however, all screen updates from the ncurses applications make it into the scrollback history. For example: when scrolling through a manpage with less as a pager, the complete manpage is in the history. Also exiting the ncurses application causes a clear screen. Editing confidential files with vim in iTerm is not a good idea since the information will stay in the history. I'd rather like the behavior of the old iTerm.

Comment 8 by lazy... on April 17, 2011 13:20

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export LESS=-X
Into your environment, and this should stop the clearing when leaving manpages or vim.

Comment 9 by gnach... on April 19, 2011 05:56

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@recryn: there was a fix to make scrolling in tmux save to history, but it causes apps like vim to also save to history when you scroll down in them. I opened bug 839 to track this.

mentioned in commit 56cb9e2d