How do I increase my iterm (tmux) window scrollback (not the line scrollback)

Question

When I want to scroll back, i.e. with my mouse (or with PageUp) I can only go up about 43 pages (about 2000 lines). Can I increase that?

I have my terminal preference -> "Scrollback Lines" set to 1000000
I also have my bashrc set with

HISTSIZE=100000
HISTFILESIZE=200000

but these settings aren't helping.

You see how far in the terminal top right, i.e.

and 1900-2000 seems about the max at which point older content is lost.

Solution 1

Putting this in my .tmux.conf file was the trick:

set -g history-limit 20000

Solution 2

For tmux you can alter its scrollback buffer with

set-option history-limit 10000

The default is 2000.

You can put this directive in your ~/.tmux.conf or at the tmux command prompt (prefix + :).

It looks like iTerm is integrated with tmux. See: https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/TmuxIntegration

Comments

[cpugeniusmv]

Is that tmux? It has its own scrollback independent of your terminal emulator.

[Michael Durrant]

+1 for a useful lead (looking in the .tmux.conf) though this didn't work as is for me. My actual answer ended up below

[cpugeniusmv]

Ah ha! Yep, set is an alias for set-option. Here's a related question that I just found: stackoverflow.com/questions/18760281/…

[Michael Durrant]

yeah. set-option actually didn't work for me

[cpugeniusmv]

Well, the critical bit you added was -g. I personally am not sure why that is important, but the linked question might have more information.