Hacker News Reader

Comment by alostpuppy | Hacker News Reader

I love ghostty. The only thing that is missing is a find feature which is such an odd omissions for an incredible piece of software.

View on HN

To add... The missing scrollbars feel painful to me. I don't even want them for scrolling, really. I want the visual reference for:

"How much content is in this window"

and

"Where am I in that content"

I still use it daily but it means I have to switch tools for certain things, and reading log files or log output is one of the more common reasons I switch.

I should probably look into trying to get the scrollback info into my statusline, No idea how easy or hard that is - so if someone has done it, feel free to shoot me pointers.

Same here, scroll bars are literally the one missing feature keeping me from making Ghostty my daily driver. But the release notes roadmap mentions they will add them for 1.3. Waiting with anticipation.

Suggestion to use Klogg (https://github.com/variar/klogg) for reading log files.

I always was on the camp of "tail -f file.log" but since discovering this app, I saw the light.

Or lnav (https://lnav.org/).

Centralized logging, a la Splunk is the gold (with what they charge, probably platinum) standard here. Watching someone who knows what they're doing at a Splunk console for a distributed system they understand is a thing of beauty. It's just a shame they charge so much.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your request but do you not pipe outputs into a pager? (Less, more, batcat, etc) I feel like I'm probably not understanding the context though.

Sometimes you just have a command write output.

In that case are scroll bars even helpful for determining position?

My terminal history is normally huge, and the log output would be some unknown percentage of the total scrollable history.

I'm still not quite sure what you mean. You can still {|,>} output from a program, so less and grep still help.

Or do you mean when you inevitably forget? Well then yeah you're at the mercy of your terminal but as others mentioned ghostty has a hack to help as well as some other terminals. But this should also help reinforce why you should pipe more often and write to files (or tee). It sucks but not making the same mistakes in the future and learning better habits will help you write better code and use better practices.

But that's the age old problem of "you can't analyze the data you didn't record" and that's a footgun you'll experience in every programming language, every experiment, and across many parts of life. Better to record and throw it away than not record and regret it.

> "you can't analyze the data you didn't record"

It IS recorded. It's right there in scrollback (Literally the default buffer to record). It's easily accessible with most tooling, including nice scrolling, mouse support, find/search, etc...

Except in Ghostty, it's not so accessible. No find, no scrollbars.

I end up having to dump it into another tool, which at least they make pretty easy (ex: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#write_scro...).

Although deciding when to do that would be easier if I had a better indicator for just how much scrollback content exists. Ex - if it's 3 pages... I'll just scroll through it. If it's 3000 pages... time to dump to file.

So no - by default I use a pager... just about never. Why would I when I have absolutely everything in scrollback by default 99.9% of the time?

---

Don't confuse your preferences with "correct" :P

I'm doing just fine with code and best practices, I'm simply stating that this is a rough edge on an otherwise lovely tool.

  > Don't confuse your preferences with "correct" :P

Don't overlook the point by fixating on a technicality

  > I'm doing just fine with code and best practices

Yet, you aren't following best practices

  > So no - by default I use a pager... just about never. Why would I when I have absolutely everything in scrollback by default 99.9% of the time?

Fewer capabilities. But those were already explained and not just by me. There really should be no need for such huge scrollbacks, you have history

  > I'm simply stating that this is a rough edge on an otherwise lovely tool.

No one has disagreed with this point. I think everyone even agrees

In the latest version Shift + ctrl + alt + j copies the entire screen and opens it in what I assume is $EDITOR (maybe this can be configured). Or just shift + ctrl + j to copy the screen to temp file and pate the path. Either way, it then just becomes configuring it to use a pager by default, or `shift+ctrl+j` and then | less. This is similar to how kitty does search, by essentially outsourcing it to an external pager. I was put off by it at first, but it's very much in the UNIX philosophy.

Kitty at least let's you control the program used, and even set up different bindings for different programs.

They'll be working on it soon: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964826929326153898

1.3 is slated for release in March 2026.

There's a few things like this but I'll give a pass because how new it is. Were this a mature project I'd be upset at incompetence, but given how young it is I think it's too early to be harsh.

Plus, they're very open about what they're doing and prioritizing. As another commenter said, it's coming soon. For the rest, open feature requests, you might have needs that others didn't think of or even realize they needed

I find the search through a file actually makes sense.

If you don't know, you can send the log to a file, and open that file to look through it. More powerful than just a search next, as you can have instance counts, search with regexp and all the bells and whistles and it virtually stops the logging.

At first I thought the same as you, now I've become quite partial to this concept. I hope they don't remove this.

I honestly didn’t even realize it was missing until I was reading this thread, cause I’m always in a zellij session which has a “search in default editor” key.

Pop the whole scrollback in helix, where I can search, select, jump around, paste stuff into a scratch buffer. It’s slick. It’s got a normal search too. But yeah I haven’t used a built in emulator search in a while I guess!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com