Package: xterm Severity: wishlist xterm provides the facility to turn the scrollback feature "scroll to bottom on new output" on or off completely, but it would be very useful to have a third option, so that that feature is disabled while the Shift key is held down and re-enabled only when the Shift key is released.
Say I am running "tail -f /var/log/syslog" in an xterm.
I want "scroll to bottom on new output" enabled so that
the tail "works".
I then go into scrollback using Shift-PageUp in order to
read some portion of the log output which has scrolled off
the top. I have read half of whatever it was when suddenly
there is some new syslog output and the xterm jumps back
to the bottom and I lose my place. Which is really
annoying.
At the moment the options available are
1) put up with it
2) explicitly disable "scroll to bottom on new output"
every time I use scrollback and then re-enable it
afterwards
3) Ctrl-C out of "tail -f", use eg. less to examine the
log file, then restart "tail -f" once I've finished
It would be really useful if holding down the Shift key
would disable "scroll to bottom on new output" for as
long as the Shift key remains depressed, and then
re-enable it when the Shift key is released. That way I
could read the tailed log in scrollback without it
randomly jumping out of sight, and when I'd finished
reading it would revert to normal without any extra
action required.
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