

Scroll bar for terminal window - etz

After recently installing debian 6 lenny, and having installed many debian systems in the past, I can honestly say Xorg is beyond comprehension at this point.  You can't even find docs to make the thing work as advertised, and certainly not on my system.<p>So my server foray was a bit different this time, I tried 6 with the kde desktop, not happening, I tried a few blends (to get the old kde desktop), not happening either.  The server is for development, and the on the old one I used debian 5 and kde, since it seemed light enough, and usable to be able to configure easily.  I tried xfce, things just not installing, so I gave up, and finally built a "black box" server.<p>All said and done it worked out, and I'm better for it.  I eventually wound up installing Xorg, and the terminal window improved to where I could read most everything before it scrolled off the screen.<p>I seem to remember a time when you could get it to scroll a page at a time but can't find/remember the command or switch.  Really the only thing I wound up missing was the scrolling ability, and since Xorg wouldn't configure beyond the very basic, a scrollbar at the side of the terminal window would be a VAST improvement, and would allow you to scroll the text editor as well.<p>Now I know that the arrow keys are taken, but I could probably use the control key in combination and get control to scroll up and down.  MCPAN, perl and other outputs get pretty long, and having configured my terminal window to allow a few hundred lines, it really helps sometimes.<p>I anybody could give me a heads up where to start, or just come up with a way, it'd be great.
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makecheck
A sort-of-substitute for a weak terminal is to use control keys and helper
commands.

For example, control-S or its equivalent mapping will "stop" text from
scrolling, and control-Q will resume it. A control-Z will suspend the process
entirely, at which point (in most shells) "fg" will resume it in the
foreground and "bg" in the background.

If you run the entire process through a pipe or create a file (e.g. with
"tee"), it is often easier to control the output and then you can't really
lose anything if it happened to scroll by too fast. Piping to "less" or "more"
gives you things like page-by-page output and search.

Yes, good terminals handle all of this too, but it's very useful to become
comfortable with the Unix commands and keys that do the same kinds of things.

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dmm
> I eventually wound up installing Xorg, and the terminal window improved to
> where I could read most everything before it scrolled off the screen.

You're running an xterm? Run it with "xterm -sb" or look up xrdb and use
"xterm*scrollBar: true". You can usually scroll an xterm using
shift+PgUp/shift+PgDown.

A terminal muxer like 'tmux' or 'screen' might help you out. They can both
page content. Or you could use a pager like 'less'.

If you have other questions, check out #debian on irc.debian.org. I can
usually find helpful people there.

