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Title: Scrollback — Terminal Feature Category | Terminfo.dev

Open Graph Title: Scrollback — Terminal Feature Category

Description: Scroll buffer behavior, reverse index, total line tracking, viewport auto-follow policy, and alternate screen interaction. Scrollback handling is one of the least standardized areas of terminal emulation — terminals differ in buffer size limits, whether alternate screen content enters scrollback, whether new output yanks a scrolled-up viewport back to the live bottom, and how reverse index interacts with scroll regions. Scrollback is the most implementation-specific area of terminal behavior. The ECMA-48 standard says nothing about scroll buffers — it's entirely a terminal emulator convention. Buffer sizes range from 0 lines (Alacritty's default was famously 0 on first release, fixed after user revolt) to 10 million+ (iTerm2). Kitty chose a different approach entirely: infinite scrollback stored efficiently on disk. The debate over whether the alternate screen should preserve scrollback, and whether output should auto-follow while the user is reading history, has generated more terminal GitHub issues than almost any other topic.

Open Graph Description: Scroll buffer behavior, reverse index, total line tracking, viewport auto-follow policy, and alternate screen interaction. Scrollback handling is one of the least standardized areas of terminal emulation — terminals differ in buffer size limits, whether alternate screen content enters scrollback, whether new output yanks a scrolled-up viewport back to the live bottom, and how reverse index interacts with scroll regions. Scrollback is the most implementation-specific area of terminal behavior. The ECMA-48 standard says nothing about scroll buffers — it's entirely a terminal emulator convention. Buffer sizes range from 0 lines (Alacritty's default was famously 0 on first release, fixed after user revolt) to 10 million+ (iTerm2). Kitty chose a different approach entirely: infinite scrollback stored efficiently on disk. The debate over whether the alternate screen should preserve scrollback, and whether output should auto-follow while the user is reading history, has generated more terminal GitHub issues than almost any other topic.

Opengraph URL: https://terminfo.dev/scrollback

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