Guys, I have a problem with konsole. A serious usability issue.
There seems to be a missing hotkey-combo for the most basic thing.
GENERALLY one would expect this key to be Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn
Which is to make the window display it’s previous contents aka. scolling the window. The same thing you do with the mouse wheel – or by grabbing the scrollbar with the mouse cursor.
The program has a window with a buffer and that in the settings that can be set to 10000 lines or whatever. But there is no hotkey for the scrollback ! “That’s just terrible, Muriel!” It’s 90% there but something is missing. It’s the setting for a hotkey that is missing.
I would like to add, that bizarrely, Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDown are bound to next/previous tab. Which is the same thing as doing Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab. That’s like a duplicate hotkey.
Also, there seem to be two different locations where hotkeys for konsole can be set up. I don’t fully grasp the reason why that is. It’s possibly part of the issue.
Theres two places:
Settings → “Configure Keyboard Shortcuts” (and there is no scroll hotkeys there at all)
And then there is:
Profiles → Edit Current Profile → Keyboard → Default(XFree 4) and or / Linux console
in this place there is a thing for a scrollback hotkey.
But it seems to do nothing at all.
It’s like not active or not responding.
Guys, it’s a bit of a mess…
Just the kind of a thing to make a penguin want to switch to a different terminal program.
Instead of like discussing it on KDE Forum. You know. I really, do wish this to be fixed.
Scolling the window back and forth is like a very basic feature for a terminal program.
I originally thought Konsole’s behavior was quite simple.
I assumed that for any Ctrl+Key command that should apply to the Konsole application itself rather than to the program inside the terminal, adding an extra Shift would suffice. For example, the shortcut to automatically split views is Ctrl+*, but in practice you have to press Shift+Ctrl+* to make it work. Based on that, I thought scrolling would be the default Ctrl+PgUp/Dn binding plus Shift.
However, for scrolling, the actual test shows that Shift+PgUp/Dn works, while the extra Ctrl has no effect.
Moreover, there is no scrolling binding in the shortcut configuration interface, which suggests that Shift+PgUp/Dn is a built‑in command.
The Configure Keyboard Shortcuts interface does list Ctrl+PgUp/Dn for switching tabs, which is even stranger: if there is only one tab, the key press is sent to the terminal (and Bash prints a 5~); if there are multiple tabs, just Ctrl+PgUp/Dn switches between tabs and is no longer sent to the terminal. This behavior differs from that of Ctrl+*.
It defines what escape sequences should be sent to the terminal when Ctrl is captured by the terminal (and ignored by Konsole itself) – that probably has nothing to do with the issue you’re currently facing.
The reality is, that for years when I want to use scrollback, i do something like “tar --help | less”. Just like I was in the fbcon console. Yeah. Sometimes i use tmux. In tmux you do Ctrl+b then PgUp to start the copy mode which let’s you scroll around the tmux buffer. These are good tricks to know because tmux works over ssh sessions on remote machines and you can leave it running by exiting out of the session. Just like the other gnu program, screen. However today screen is worse than tmux tmux is the king of remote terminal sessions.
So yeah.
The KDE experience is. (atleast for me).
That you do not have access to the built in scoll feature of the window of the terminal program.
It’s like as if it’s not there.
Unless you take hands off keyboard and use the mouse scroll wheel. That’s the actual de-facto reality of this being issue. FOR YEARS I’ve used konsole this way. And for me the practical testing has, not just today, but for the longest time showed, that scolling by keyboard in konsole simply _does_not_work_.
Recently I was just trying to do a complex tar command. I did “tar --help” and of course it scrolled off the screen because it’s so long. And then I went’ oh-yeah let’s scroll this sucker but using the keyboard. You can’t! It’s broken. And the settings for it area a mess.
By the way, I like konsole a lot. It’s one of my favourite programs. I spend a lot of time on the console. I use it a lot.
I’ve got it otherwise set up perfectly. The fonts, the colours, the unicode translations, everything works. It looks great and does almost everything as expected. But not the scrolling.
It’s like the PgUp was a modifier key you have to press and hold down PgUp and then press Shift! Of course if you lean over and look closely at the settings dialog that’s what is says. It’s just not what the intuition is!
Because when you start a key combo by holding down PgUp or the up arrow (scrolls up one line). And THEN press shift.
Well, what it does, is the keypress goes first into a program such as bash and it’s going to pull up a command from the history into the edit line. Like the up arrow always does. Well anyway it does that – then you press shift and the screen starts to go up. But if you release the buttons in the wrong order it’s going to jump back down because you’re still holding the up arrow and the edit line gets that keypress and it’s going to be putting chars on the screen and that’s going to make the window scroll down again.
Also, now that I’ve tried this newly discoevered feature of konsole for the first time. It bothers me that “Page up” is a literal page up with no overlap with the previous screen. That makes it difficult to discern if I went up one screen full or more. Because it jumps exactly one screen up you can’t see what the next lines are. And these are-- mind you – buttons with autorepeat so you’ve got to just barely touch the shift key to make it go up one screen but no more. Not like two or three screens.
Is it supposed to be like this?
Up arrow + Shift ?
PgUp + Shift ?
Or is there something wrong with these keybind settings. I’ve used this program for 10+ years and it took me this long to discover that okay all of the keys can work as modifier buttons. So yeah it matters in which order you press and hold which key. That’s the way konsole is set up out of the box.
What the ****. Now it I’m noticing it works all the time even with Shift+PgUp. It’s just a case of having to hold the buttons down. The effect is not immediate. I’ve literally never noticed this before. Oh god!
Theres a DELAY. In that keypress. For whatever reason.
I was wondering if that might be Plasma Keyboard and the “long press for special characters” feature, but it doesn’t seem to be. Even with those features enabled I don’t get the same behaviour.
So I don’t know what’s making it different between your machine and mine!
Yeah it seems maybe something to do with how the keyboard repeats. Or rather – how it is before it repeats. The original first keydown seems to be ignored.
I’m using a finnish keyboard layout. But otherwise system is set as English.
Thank you for bringing this up, I just assumed after all these years that Konsole couldn’t do this. Nowhere in the Configure Keyboard Shortcuts does it mention there is a command for scrolling up/down with the keys. Nowhere. And if I go to Help → Find Action, it’s not in there either. So this is a secret that you just have to be in-the-know to use. I hate this. This should be a visible keybinding. This is a bug. It shouldn’t take 18 years of using Konsole and this is how I discover this “feature”.