[mosh-users] Thoughts on scrolling

[Scott Gifford]

Hello,

I have just started using mosh, and I'm very excited about it!  The
problems it is designed to solve are problems I have every day, and being
able to effortlessly manage connections from my laptop to different servers
on different networks in the face of constantly changing connectivity,
connecting and disconnecting from VPNs, etc. would be fantastic.

Looking at the comments on issue #2<https://github.com/keithw/mosh/issues/2>,
I had some thoughts on scrolling I wanted to share.

Maybe just using the keyboard for scrolling would be OK, but the scrollbar
UI is pretty friendly and habitual, so it may be hard to move away from.
 Terminal programs also have useful features like search, configurable
scrollback sizes, etc. that I would miss if they were not also implemented
in mosh.

It's true that screen and tmux have scrolling features built in already,
but I personally use them only rarely because they are so limited and slow
to use.  When I'm in deep hack mode and want to scroll back to see the
output of some long test or diagnostic program, the mental effort in
hitting ^A[ then a few dozen up-arrows is many times greater than just
twiddling the scroll-wheel on my mouse.  Frankly I usually don't bother, I
just run it again, pipe it through less, and wish I weren't in screen.  It
is entirely because of poor scrolling support that I rarely use screen or
tmux at all, only when I know I have a long-term process I need to keep
running.

It would be great if mosh could do better than tmux and screen with
scrolling.

The Mac terminal application iTerm2 has some special integration with tmux
that lets the application scrollbars interact with tmux directly, see
http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration.  Something like that
would be very interesting.  Maybe a terminal escape-based API would let a
mosh-aware terminal application provide a better user experience for
scrolling.

An option to sync up not just the state of the current screen display but
the display plus history would also be interesting.

Hope that feedback is helpful, and keep up the great work!

-----Scott.
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