Sindhu S
sindhus@live.in 2013
Ekaterina Gerasimova
kittykat3756@gmail.com 2013–2014
Change the scroll output and scrollbar behavior.
Daniel Șerbănescu
daniel [at] serbanescu [dot] dk 2018

# Scrollbar preferences

When a lot of output is printed to your terminal screen, it can be helpful to have your terminal behave in a specific manner so that it is easier to work with.

# Scrollbar visibility

You can disable the scrollbar:

Press the menu button in the top-right corner of the window and select Preferences.

In the sidebar, select your current profile in the Profiles section.

Select Scrolling.

Uncheck Show scrollbar.

Your preference is saved immediately.

# Scroll on output

You can lock scrolling so that it always shows the newest output while a command executes and produces output.

Press the menu button in the top-right corner of the window and select Preferences.

In the sidebar, select your current profile in the Profiles section.

Select Scrolling.

Check Scroll on output.

# Scroll on input

You can set the terminal to automatically scroll to the bottom of the window when you input text into the prompt.

Press the menu button in the top-right corner of the window and select Preferences.

In the sidebar, select your current profile in the Profiles section.

Select Scrolling.

Check Scroll on keystroke.

# Scrollback lines

You can limit the number of lines of terminal output which are remembered.

Press the menu button in the top-right corner of the window and select Preferences.

In the sidebar, select your current profile in the Profiles section.

Select Scrolling.

Check Limit scrollback to and enter a number of lines to limit scrollback.

Optionally, you can click on + to increase and - to decrease lines.

You can choose to have unlimited scrollback.

Press the menu button in the top-right corner of the window and select Preferences.

In the sidebar, select your current profile in the Profiles section.

Select Scrolling.

Uncheck Limit scrollback to.

Scrollback data is stored in compressed and encrypted files on disk, under the system’s default location for temporary files (usually /tmp). These files are unlinked immediately after their creation, and as such, do not show up in the directory listing. The occupied disk space is freed up as soon as the corresponding terminal closes.

Make sure you have sufficient disk space available for these temporary files. If in doubt, monitor disk usage for example with the command du /tmp.

A giant scrollback buffer makes resizing the terminal window slower. As a rule of thumb, resizing gets noticeably slow at around 1 million lines.