Short pager output sticks to prompt rather than top of terminal

By alle... on February 09, 2015 05:56 (imported from Google Code)

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What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Run What steps will reproduce the problem?
2. Run lessWhat steps will reproduce the problem?
3. Run `less on some file whose number of lines is smaller than the height of the terminal.

What is the expected output?
The pager output should stick to the top of the screen. (try on Terminal.app to see how it should work, an animation of iTerm2's behavior is attached)

What do you see instead?
That the output sticks to bottom (where the prompt lies)

What version of iTerm2 are you using?
Build 2.9.20150206-nightly

What OS version are you using?
10.10.2

Please provide any additional information below.

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com.googlecode.iterm2.plist

debuglog.txt.gz

Comment 1 by gnach... on February 11, 2015 01:39

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There is a schism.
Terminal and Konsole both move the cursor to the origin on DECSET 1049; xterm and Gnome Terminal do not (and have the same behavior as iTerm2).

The definition of ti is open to interpretation:
"String of commands to put the terminal into whatever special modes are needed or appropriate for programs that move the cursor nonsequentially around the screen. Programs that use termcap to do full-screen display should output this string when they start up."

I suspect iTerm2 does what the author of less intended, but it does look nicer in Terminal.

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Labels: Milestone: Release4.0

Comment 2 by alle... on February 11, 2015 05:12

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Any chance at exposing this in the advanced preferences? Also, which classes should I look at if I wanted to implement this?

Comment 3 by gnach... on February 11, 2015 06:11

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That's what I was thinking too. Advanced prefs are defined in iTermAdvancedSettingsModel.[hm], and the behavior would be to move the cursor to the origin in -terminalClearScreen in PTYTextView.m (e.g. by calling setCursorX:Y:)

Milestone changed to Future Release

gnome-terminal (vte) changed the behavior about a year ago to match xterm. There was a reason for that, I'm quite sure (I hated the end result of how less shows up at the cursor rather than at the top of the screen, so there must have been some other more important issue that we fixed with this change). I can do a git bisect to refresh my memories if it matters.

I'm curious if there's any real breakage or if people just think it looks nicer one way.

Milestone changed to %Review for next version

mentioned in issue #4801 (closed)

mentioned in issue #5077 (closed)

I've come around on this one. Fixed in commit 5958547f, will be in tomorrow's nightly build.

Status changed to closed