Scrolling in terminal.app

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Scrolling in terminal.app

Is there anyway to make terminal.app scroll with the mouse instead of having to use the arrow keys? In my fedora 11 virtual machine I can scroll through man/vim pages with just the mouse but not in terminal.app, which is sometimes a pain. I looked around online but couldn't find anything pertaining to this so thanks for any help.

macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jul 16, 2009 10:25 AM

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Answer 1

squier Author

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Jul 16, 2009 11:06 AM in response to squier

Sorry, after doing another search I found it doesn't look like this is possible.

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Answer 2

Jul 16, 2009 11:25 AM in response to squier

Keep trying! It (using the scroll roller to move up and down in a terminal window) works for me; problem is, it's worked so long I can't remember if any special care was needed. I set up a group of color-coded windows (xterm-color emulation in the Settings part of Terminal preferences), with bash as the startup shell command.

After you configure the array of windows (colors, text color, positions, etc) you can save the batch uisng the menu item Windows->Save Windows as Group.

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Answer 3

BobHarris

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Jul 16, 2009 12:04 PM in response to squier

Works for me too.

I do have a Logitech MX mouse and I use USB Overdrive as my mouse driver, but I do not think this has anything to do with it, as I do not have an special Terminal related settings for my mouse.

It also works with my Griffin "PowerMate" scroll knob. Again no special settings related to Terminal.

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Answer 4

squier Author

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Jul 16, 2009 2:40 PM in response to BobHarris

So if you do "man g++" you can use just the mouse to scroll through the entire man page? I was unable to get this to work on my computer nor another mac I tested. In my Fedora virtual machine I can scroll up and down through the man page with just the mouse which is what I would like to do in terminal.app

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Answer 5

BobHarris

Level 9

52,979 points

Jul 16, 2009 5:47 PM in response to squier

We are answering the wrong question.

The 'more' utility which is used to page the 'man' output does not accept mouse input.

If you want to set your 'PAGER' environment variable to a utility that accepts mouse input, then you can scroll your 'man' output.

This has nothing to do with being able to use your scroll wheel with the Terminal and everything to do with the application you are trying to control.

OK, maybe Terminal is a little to blame. I'm not sure if Terminal will pass along mouse input to the applications running in the terminal. For that you might need to use something like iTerm or an xterm in an X11 session.

But even then, you still need to have a PAGER that knows what to do with mouse input.

Do you have this 'man' scroll wheel capability in another Linux/Unix OS? Maybe you can get the sources for that PAGER and port them to Mac OS X (or use <http://MacPorts.org> or <http://www.finkproject.org/> for already ported software.

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