A-Shell includes a handy and useful feature called scrollback which enables the viewing of lines that have scrolled off the top of the screen. If you perform a DIR command, for example, and A-Shell outputs 50 or 100 lines, only the last 24 lines are visible; the others have scrolled off the top of the display. In the absence of scrollback, those lines are lost to you. With scrollback, however, you simply move the screen "backwards" or "up" to reveal the missing lines.
Rather than being a fixed, 24-line display, in other words, your screen can be a "scrolling window" on everything that has recently been written to it.
To turn scrolling on/off:
| • | Go to Settings on the menu bar and click on Scrollback. |
Once it it turned on, you can scroll up and down by:
| • | holding down the Ctrl key while using the UpArrow and DownArrow keys |
| • | holding down the Ctrl key while rolling up/down with the mouse wheel |
| • | using the vertical scroll bar on the right edge of the window |
Also note the following:
| • | The scrollback buffer holds approximately eight screens (200 lines) of text. |
| • | The scrollback buffer is always on. The actual scrollback of the buffer may be turned off and on, but the buffer itself is always active. This means that when you first turn it on, the existing scrollback buffer text (i.e., the last 200 lines of screen output) can immediately be displayed. |
| • | There is no disadvantage to leaving scrollback on. So it makes sense to turn it on the first time you need it, and then just leave it on for the rest of your session. |
History
2017 July, A-Shell 6.5.1610: Add Scrollback to Settings menu to toggle visibility of the vertical scroll bar.
