Is there a way to disable scrolling through command history for the Xfce terminal? I don't wish to rely on palm rejection, I'd just like it disabled when I'm using the terminal. Specifically I'm talking about not cycling through previous commands at the prompt when scrolling with mouse/touchpad.
3 Answers
You are describing the feature of VTE (used in XFCE Terminal) which translates wheel-mouse scrolling into up/down cursor-keys when using the alternate-screen. That happens if you are running screen
in something like xterm
. You can avoid that by preventing screen
from using the terminal's alternate screen feature.
For example (see How to disable alternate buffer in GNU screen itself but not for vim, less inside it?), tell screen
that the feature does not exist (by putting this in .screenrc
):
termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@
A similar workaround is used for tmux
(see Properly disable terminal capabilities for alternate screen in tmux), putting this in .tmux.conf
:
set -ga terminal-overrides ',xterm*:smcup@:rmcup@'
This translation of scrolling behavior does not appear to be configurable in VTE-based terminals. It is configurable in xterm
, e.g., alternateScroll
(patch #282).
Further reading:
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It's the same problem - different details for solution (will see...) Apr 24, 2016 at 15:49
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I'm using ArchLinux, I find it strange that I didn't find termcapinfo with pacman/yaourt, will take a look whether it's part of other named package or a related tool.– oblitumApr 24, 2016 at 15:51
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It is the name of a setting in
.screenrc
(configuration forscreen
). Apr 24, 2016 at 15:55 -
1I wouldn't call it a 'feature' of VTE. I'd call it a bug. hard-coding 8 up or down arrows in response to scroll-wheel events is a bug.– casApr 25, 2016 at 23:41
In the Edit > Preferences
menu of xfce4-terminal
you can disable the scrollbar.
If you set the scrollback
value to 1, it will disable scrolling back using the scroll wheel on your mouse.
I'm using xfce4-terminal 0.6.3
, the default version for Ubuntu 14.04.
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1My particular issue isn't scrolling the window, but cycling through previous commands, I don't wish this to happen through mouse/touchpad, when I scroll, it's not the window that scrolls, but instead, cycling commands at the prompt.– oblitumApr 24, 2016 at 15:24
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After applying the accepted answer, I also need this one to avoid scrooling now. Thanks.– oblitumApr 24, 2016 at 16:02
I was just having this same problem using iTerm on my Mac. Whenever I would use the screen
feature I was unable to scroll up/down, super annoying.
To disable the command line history on-scroll, do the following:
Open
Preferences
and click onAdvanced
tabScroll down to the
Mouse
section, or search for "scroll"Locate option
Scroll wheel sends arrow keys when in alternate screen mode
and select No from the dropdown
And you're all set!