Page scroll in Terminal

Written on May 14, 2018

I’m a big fan of using tmux from Terminal on the Mac. One of the things that I found annoying though was scrolling a tmux pane since I choose not to use mouse support, which is turned off in tmux by default.

I would use the arrow key to scroll up and down a pane line by line sifting through sometimes hundreds of lines of output trying to get to the information that is important to me.

It turns out in Terminal there’s a way to navigate by scrolling a page at a time. To navigate a page at a time when scrolling in Terminal on macOS, you’ll want to press the fn key plus either the up or down arrow key.

The number of lines that determines a page when scrolling in Terminal is based on the size of the Terminal window or if you’re using a pane in tmux, the size of the pane. Adjusting the size of the window or pane will also change the page scrolling amount.

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