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Comment by mort96

5 days ago

The only thing I'm missing from ghostty is scrollback search. It's planned AFAIU, I hope it gets there eventually. Otherwise, ghostty has been pretty good.

(I know you can fake scrollback search with tmux. It's not the same.)

13 comments

mort96

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klooney  5 days ago

There seems to be a contingent that just doesn't use scroll back search, which I find kind of baffling.

  • __float  5 days ago

    There are a ton of people who _immediately_ open tmux/zellij/etc. when they're doing anything in the terminal. This means you use its backscroll and search feature, and you wouldn't notice.

    @mitchellh seems to rely on the Ghostty feature to dump scrollback to a file, and edit/search over that.

    I found it a bit too inconvenient when using remote systems frequently, though. (If I'm missing a trick, I'd love to use Ghostty! But I'm just not a fan of multiplexers.)

  • sevg  5 days ago

    I’ve never used scrollback search, and it was a discovery for me that there’s a contingent that are very vocal in their demands for scrollback search.

    I can see why someone would feel attached to this feature though.

    Mostly I’m looking forward to seeing it implemented so I can stop reading complaints about this being missing in every thread about ghostty!

    • doritosfan84  4 days ago

      My use cases are trying to find the one test that failed out of my suite and finding a specific log print when my app is running. Yes, there are other ways to do both of these. Having scrollback search in the terminal is a very convenient option though.

    • Shadowmist  5 days ago

      I wish they didn’t lock the GitHub issue so that we could see how many thousands more reactions it would get.

  • bigstrat2003  5 days ago

    Honestly, I had never even heard of it before this very thread. It doesn't seem all that useful to me, but I don't truthfully know how much or how little I would use it in practice.

    • gsinclair  4 days ago

      Same here. What I think I’d like more is the ability to open the most recent command output in $EDITOR.

nusaru  5 days ago

Relevant GitHub issue: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

  • Imustaskforhelp  5 days ago

    > To be completely clear, it’s not on the “IMMEDIATE” roadmap (as noted in the prior comment). It’s absolutely on the roadmap and I even already started some it in a branch. But as a passion project, we prioritize working on whatever we want and this isn’t currently the priority. It’s high on the list but not like.. next release (“immediate”) priority at the time of this comment.

    I mean I can respect that, personally it isn't as a big of deal with me so I use ghostty on my mac but I would still think that I would advocate ghostty only after disclosing this to anyone to be really honest.