Hacker News Reader

Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

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.)

View on HN

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.)

I use ctrl+R for search that way I'm not dependent of a terminal emulator features and can get to work even on random computers.

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#index-rev...

I think most people that want this feature want to be able to search through terminal output, not the commands they've previously used.

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

> 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.

It's planned for 1.3 in March https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

Reply on news.ycombinator.com