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Comment by azertify | Hacker News Reader

Search in scroll back is coming in 1.3, unfortunately that's going to be 6 months away.

There's a lot happening in the Ghostty app though, check out the 1.2 release notes

Is there a blog post anywhere that explains why it has taken so long to get search working? Ghostty is such a nice app but that's such a fundamental feature that there has to be a good reason... It's the only thing keeping me on iTerm2.

Does nobody use grep?

How can you use grep to search the scrollback/screen buffer?

Ghostty has a write_scrollback_file action you can use to write the scrollback to a temporary file. I have this set to cmd+shift+f, so I simply

less [cmd+shift+f] [enter]

You can use grep similarly.

I don't want to presume your use case, but Ghostty has a command for dumping the buffer to a file, which I use for processing output "too late" to use grep.

keybind = ctrl+alt+shift+o=write_scrollback_file:open

Try a pager instead. Batcat is more feature rich but there's always the good old less (and more) command. Both work great with grep. I do things like the following multiple times a day

  $ cat foo.log | less
  $ cat foo.log | $PAGER
  $ cat foo.log | grep 09-23-2025 | less

Side note / pro tip: on a new line in the terminal press control-x control-e. If you're in zsh you need to edit your config but this will work out of the box for bash.

You can leave the cat at home.

  less foo.log
  grep 09-25-2025 foo.log | less

https://mrmr.io/cat

but he will feel lonely if he doesn't participate :(

What good is grep if you want to search the build log on your screen that took an hour in the making? Should have thought of tee-ing it, well duh.

You just rawdog that to stdout without a log file?

I do. Setting up log files for each and every command seems tedious. I would rather just cmd+f to search and have it work for everything, as it is a property of the terminal, rather than a specific command.

Of course. Why not? I can use the terminal's search facility to search its infinite scrollback buffer.

If I don't anticipate problems, or things are slower than I thought? Sure

"Do you not have phones?"

Try Cmd-Shift-J. It dumps your buffer to a temp file, with the file path made ready for you. I do that and then open the temp file with vi.

That's the workaround I've used. I still want to be able to just press command F and see "error" highlighted throughout the scrollback.

Best news I've heard all day.

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