Terminal: Scroll past last line

[scrouthtv]

On many Linux Terminal Emulators it is possible to scroll past the last line to move it to the center of the screen (or even further).

Would it be possible to implement a comparable feature?

[egmontkob]

On many Linux Terminal Emulators

Which ones? I can't recall seeing this functionality in any of them.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Hi! Thanks for the request. We actually worked really hard on the _in-box windows console_ to add the option to turn this behavior off. We're probably not going to reintroduce it.

[scrouthtv]

@egmontkob

these are the first four i could think off

on linux i run termite as an emulator & it looks similar

[DHowett-MSFT]

Those are all the same terminal emulator, _windows conhost_. Of course they have the same behavior.

[scrouthtv]

Will there be an option in the settings to use the conhost type behaviour in the new Terminal?

Thanks for your help nevertheless.

[egmontkob]

The screenshots are not Linux terminals, as Dustin already pointed out.

Termite uses VTE for terminal emulation, which I'm a developer of, so I can pretty confidently tell you that it doesn't allow this kind of scrolling. :)

I'm honestly wondering: What's your actual use case, why do you want this behavior?

The most precious use of the screen real estate area is to show the previous command's output. If it's easier for your eyes to look at the top of the screen, you can clear the screen by pressing Ctrl+L. Unlike in some other terminals (e.g. xterm; not sure about Windows Terminal), in VTE it scrolls out the previous contents so you don't lose information.

Another trick I've seen is to emit from your prompt a couple of newlines (maybe half the height of the screen), followed by the same number of cursor up movements. This ensures there's room below the prompt, and that the contents are scrollable accordingly. It doesn't position the scrollbar where you'd probably want it, though, but you might give it a try.

[scrouthtv]

Sorry if I got something wrong...

Just my very first problem was using autocompletion:

I don't know the exact issue here, but using this specific feature just feels a lot better with having free space below:

[DHowett-MSFT]

That just looks like a bug, honestly. Either we are handling something wrong or fish isn’t doing something right. Would you share your exact repro steps? Thanks!

[egmontkob]

The upper screencast definitely looks buggy. It's unclear to me what environment that shows, there's no window decoration to give a hint, and the color scheme doesn't match the earlier screenshots either. @scrouthtv could you please tell us what terminal emulator (e.g. Windows Terminal/Conhost or Termite) and what shell (fish? with the same config as in the bottom one?) that is? (Or Dustin, is it clear to you and it's only me missing something?)

Anyway. I could easily imagine the user experience that the prompt shows up in the bottom row initially, and is pushed upwards on demand where are completion choices to display. Or I could easily imagine the prompt being pushed upwards straight away to leave room for a fixed number of such completions later. Either one seems nicely usable. In either case, though, it's your shell that knows how much room it wants to reserve for this feature and when it wants to do (vs. when it actually intends to fill up that area with text, without further empty lines below), and as such, it should be the shell that emits control instructions accordingly. I can't see how the terminal on its own could automagically add those lines to the scrollable area.

[scrouthtv]

First thing's first, I checked back on some Linux Terminal emulators and none of them really had this feature. So I guess I was wrong the entire time.

I didn't do much for this to happen. I installed fish via cygwin, changed the cmd.exe in the json config to the path of fish.exe (cygwin provides linux applications as exes) and just tried autocompletion on everything default settings.

I'm pretty positive this is just some cygwin compatibility bug because it looks the same with auto completion in zsh...

@egmontkob Pushing up the prompt is how I guess it is supposed to work: