Arch Linux

synthead

Member

Registered: 2006-05-09

Posts: 1,337

Pausing the terminal?

Say I'm in text mode ... there's a lot of text flying by the screen and I wanna pause whatever it's doing to read it.  How would one do this?  Thanks!

allucid

Member

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 259

Re: Pausing the terminal?

If you are using Xterm you can add

XTerm*scrollTtyOutput:  false

to your ~/.Xdefaults and it will stop when you use the mousewheel or shift+pgup.

synthead

Member

Registered: 2006-05-09

Posts: 1,337

Re: Pausing the terminal?

Actually, I'm just using the good ol text-based terminal

allucid

Member

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 259

Re: Pausing the terminal?

Try Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q or the scroll lock key.

Ctrl-S will lock, Ctrl-Q will unlock.

zamb

Member

Registered: 2006-01-19

Posts: 5

Re: Pausing the terminal?

allucid's comment is probably what you want. (You might want to use the "Scroll Lock" key which does the same thing as CTRL+S and CTRL+Q.)

But what if you want to read the few lines that just passed by?  Use the "Shift+PageUp" and "Shift+PageDown" keys for that. (Works even with gnome-terminal.)
Be warned that once you switch consoles/terminals, the hidden/back buffer will lost and you won't be able to scroll back.

(Just in case you or anybody else didn't know this.)
Ziyad.