On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

On Sat, 10 Jan 2015, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:

> This drives me insane! When I 'man foo' and find the relevant bits in
> the document, when I quit out of the pager I want those bits to stay on
> the screen so I can refer to them, dammit! There are two shortcuts to
> this, both involving custom termcap/terminfo entries.

I'm glad I'm not the only one annoyed by this "feature".

I am also not happy with this behavior.

There is at least one "fix" I have found for this particular annoyance.

A little background: this behavior uses a pair of termcap entries called "ti" and "te" which, on most recent xterm implementations, switch between alternate screens. Many programs on startup switch to the alternate screen to keep their displays separate from the normal command scroll buffer.

There is an xterm resource "titeInhibit" which, if set to true, will disable the remarkably annoying mode switch that is used by less (and also any other application that tries to use the screen swap).

Given this started out as a termcap thread, hopefully this will be appropriate!

This complete disable of the screen swap may not be what everyone is looking for, but it certainly was what I wanted.
--
Russell