Make terminal use pageup/pagedown instead of shift-pageup/shift-pagedown?

Question

I've grown quite weary of shift-pgup to page up in gnome terminal, the command line, terminator, and guake, etc.

Any way to easily make these apps use the straight page-up and page-down keys for paging around?

Solution 1

I am afraid this is not possible, as no PgUp/PgDown will be sent to command-line applications, which will render some of them unusable. This is a good old days Unix feature.

If you want more user-friendly scrolling, I suggest using the less command. It's used this way:

command-with-lot-of-output | less

This will start the less command with output of your original command. (*More about piping output to other programs can be found here.

less can be navigated using arrows or PgUp/PgDown. For your convenience it also provides searching and more (see man less for more). You can quit less by pressing the q key.

Solution 2

Use xterm and tweak the keybindings (in ~/.Xresources) like this:

xterm*VT100.Translations: #override \n\
    <KeyPress>Prior:scroll-back(1,page)\n\
    <KeyPress>Next:scroll-forw(1,page)\n\

gnome-terminal says PageUp/PageDown is for applications within the terminal and using them would be confusing...

Comments

[HDave]

I researched the heck out of this and while it seems there at 100+ keystrokes that you can map in the command console, page-up and page-down aren't two of them!

[Jonathan Hartley]

less is not suitable for just scrolling up/down in the contents of your terminal, and invoking it is hardly more convenient than pressing shift. Not Jakub's fault at all, but it's sad there isn't an answer to this question.

[William]

@HDave here is how to do it in xterm unix.stackexchange.com/questions/339160/…

[William]

@JonathanHartley here is how to do it in xterm unix.stackexchange.com/questions/339160/…

[William]

then why does xterm support the option and not gnome terminal? Either way I am the one that both linked the answer above and posted the bounty I'm not giving a bounty to this answer.

[aba]

askubuntu.com/users/33577/liam-william Oops, I didn't read until the bottom (at the top, it's about the clipboard). And: fair enough! I wouldn't give it to me: I tried to post an URL that supports my gnome-terminal statemtent, but all I found were outdated, i.e. non-existant links...