On 4 Jul 2019, at 14:55, Michael wrote:
On 2019-07-04, at 3:03 AM, Richard L. Hamilton <[email protected]>
wrote:
AFAIK, if your terminal display is restored after exiting vi, the
terminal provides (and vi uses, via the smcup and rmcup terminfo
strings) an alternate
buffer, for full-screen use. Ideally, that alternate buffer should
NOT include any scroll back, so I think the behavior you describe
might even be a bug.
This "Separate screen" behavior has always irked me. It means that as
soon as I leave a curses-based display -- such as anything going
through "less" as a pager -- such as man pages -- then I lose all the
information I was looking at a moment ago.
'export LESS=-FRX' is a line I put in ~/.bashrc or ~/.shrc on every
machine I log in to. If you only want to eliminate the clear-on-exit,
you can omit 'FR' or see 'man less' for all of the options. Obviously
this is only for 'less' and not other programs like vi(m).
The problem for me is always that switching to a termcap/terminfo
setting that doesn't have this problem results in other settings being
lost because it's too generic.
Right now, I use "TERM=ansi", because I cannot stand that "We'll clear
your screen of the info you wanted now" behavior.
What's the best term setting to use for maximum abilities without
losing that data,
That's a very good question. I suspect that there's some
ansi/vt220/xterm variant that disables the alternate screen buffer but
retains xterm-like functionality, but I'm not sure what it is.
There's a page at https://www.shallowsky.com/linux/noaltscreen.html
which offers advice on this and a "xterm-noalt" definition which may or
may not do what you want. I have NOT tested anything there, it is just
the 1st result from searching for 'xterm alternate screen'
or is there some way to get that data back when you leave full-screen
mode? (is there a second output buffer that can be switched between
somehow?)
Yes. There's the "Show Alternate Screen/Hide Alternate Screen" commands
in Terminal's View menu. Do those not do what you want?
--
Bill Cole
[email protected] or [email protected]
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
