How can I scroll up more (increase the scroll buffer) in iTerm2?

Question

How can I scroll up more on iterm2 to get full output? At times, for example if I am doing unit tests, the errors are so large than I need to keep scrolling up to which I cannot scroll up anymore but the output continues further up beyond the top of the scroll. How can I access that? I tried page up more but not getting me there.

Solution 1

There is an option “unlimited scrollback buffer” which you can find under Preferences > Profiles > Terminal or you can just pump up number of lines that you want to have in history in the same place.

Solution 2

Solution: In order to increase your buffer history on iterm bash terminal you've got two options:

Go to iterm -> Preferences -> Profiles -> Terminal Tab -> Scrollback Buffer (section)

Option 1. select the checkbox Unlimited scrollback

Option 2. type the selected Scrollback lines numbers you'd like your terminal buffer to cache (See image below)

Solution 3

Tree Step:

1. cmd + ,
2. Profiles Tab
3. Select "Terminal" and mark the "Unlimited scrollback"

now restart your terminal and BOOM

Watch video here: https://i.imgur.com/yFwduAl.mp4

Solution 4

macOS default terminal (not iTerm2)

macOS 10.15.7

1. open Terminal
2. click Prefrences...
3. select Window tab
4. just change Scrollback to Limit number of rows to: what your wanted.

my screenshots

View more solutions

Comments

[Sergio]

the unlimited scrollback didn't work for me properly (maybe because of zsh or another config... I don't know) I had to put 100.000 in the textbox and unchecked the "unlimited scrollback buffer" option and now scrolling back is nicer

[ReduxDJ]

Why is that not the default?

[Hew Wolff]

Not easy to find, even if you use the Help search!

[cseelus]

@ReduxDJ because that can quickly eat all your RAM, for example when logging the output of a webserver

[Ken Ratanachai S.]

Watchout for high memory usuage, when running a command with lots of output.

[Rob]

This should default to way higher.

[gdibble]

I know it's not iTerm2 but this is still useful - thanks for covering bases