On Wed, Apr 16, 2014, at 4:19, Amadeus Folego wrote: > It works! As I am using tmux just for the scrollback and paste > capabilities I am not worried with losing sessions. > > Maybe I'll write a suckless multiplexer for this sometime.
Eh - "multiplexing" refers to the multiple session capability, not to the scrolling. The basic issue is that tmux provides three relatively distinct features: scrolling, multiplexing, and detachability. A program providing any one of these capabilities essentially has to be a terminal emulator - you can take some shortcuts, like passing through the keyboard, and passing through output rather than reinterpreting it, but you've got to parse all output control sequences to know what's on the screen. For scrolling, you need it in order to understand what has scrolled off the screen and in order to restore the main screen when you're done with scrolling. For multiplexing, you need it in order to effectively switch between windows. For detaching, you need it to restore the content when reattaching. I've actually used a detaching program that doesn't track screen contents (it discards all output while detached, and sends SIGWINCH or control-L on reattach to make the program redraw itself) - it's not pleasant to deal with for non-fullscreen programs. You could do multiplexing the same way, in principle, but it's intractable for scrolling. A "truly suckless" design would have the three features in separate programs. And since they all have to do essentially the same thing (maintain their own idea of the screen state and redraw it on demand), this functionality could be in a library. Or you could just have it in the scrolling program and the other two programs don't care, which would make it a somewhat unpleasant experience to try to use them without being in conjunction with the scrolling program. That's also three separate programs you have to control from the keyboard.
