Byobu breaks scrolling of the terminal emulator buffer

[goto]

There have been other reports about scrolling issues with byobu. With:

    termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@
    altscreen on

in the profile file the text indeed goes to the xterm scrollback buffer, and scrolling does work. But it is unusable.

If I scroll with a mouse wheel or Shift+Pg/up in a matter of seconds byobu will bring me back to the beggining. My first thought was that it happens on the very first notification interval. For testing I disabled all notifications and I managed to scroll a bigger chunk of text but byobu would still bring me down to the beggining.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Please use screen's scrollback buffer instead.

Press F7, and then scroll with your up/down, pageup/pagedown, or mouse wheel.

This goes back up to 10,000 lines *per window*. Otherwise, your scrollback will be garbled between different windows.

:-Dustin

[Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen (ralf-nieuwenhuijsen)]

Why isn't this scrollback buffer on by default?

[Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen (ralf-nieuwenhuijsen)]

Perhaps i wasn't clear. I'm quite used to, like many, to use the scrollwheel on my mouse.
These commands can, and are, captured. (they make the command line cycle through previous commands)

What I'm suggesting is to have this actually scrollback, while not in scrollback mode.
You know. Like a normal terminal.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

If you tell me the settings to add or change in .screenrc, I'll try to
add them to byobu.

[Dmitry Verkhoturov (paskal-07)]

Please tell me if there is an option to make terminal scrollable instead of history commands rotating? The point is to get normal mouse wheel response what terminal scroll is.

[Dustin Kirkland  (kirkland)]

Dmitry,

You can do this, but you have to press F7 first, to enter into scrollback mode.

Press F7, then use your mouse wheel to scroll. Use escape or enter to exit scrollback mode.

[linfidel (linfidel)]

F7 does not do anything for me except output a tilde (~). Anything after this is interpreted normally, and there is absolutely no way to scroll back that i can see. None of the functions keys have any effect in byobu.

I see no way in the help menu (from ctrl-A + ?) either. This makes byobu unusable for me.

[Dražen Lučanin (kermit666)]

I also find having to enter a special "scrolling" mode is not really desireable. Not only does it take time to perform, but it also breaks consistency with normal gnome-terminal usage. It is also not the same as traditional window scrolling even in this scrollback mode, because you first need to get the cursor to the top of the window to start moving the screen up (and vice versa for scrolling down).

[bones (bones7456)]

You can try tmux backend:

$ cat ~/.byobu/backend
BYOBU_BACKEND=tmux

[Dražen Lučanin (kermit666)]

Thanks for the advice, I see that it works with tmux. I have a different problem with that backend, though:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/byobu/+bug/887387