I've noticed with ROXTerm and other xterm-like programs that when using the default xterm terminal type, they maintain separate screen buffers for the shell and certain applications, like editors, pagers, etc.
So for example, if you are working in the shell, run "man foo", the screen will clear and the foo man page will display. While the man page is being displayed, the scrollback buffer showing your prior shell activity is inaccessible. Similarly, once you've quit man, the shell activity reappears, and the man page contents disappears, making it impossible to refer back to the contents of the man page.
Another scenario is using the screen utility. Once you run it, the GUI terminal will never show more than the current screen in its scrollback buffer. Sure, screen has keyboard commands for accessing its own scrollback buffers, but that defeats the point of using a GUI terminal emulator.
Clearly this is being done as a feature, and intended to let you run "full screen" console applications without cluttering up your scrollback history, but I find it presumptuous that the ser wants this behavior, and without a simple way to toggle between the two screen buffers, it actually gets in the way, forcing the user to do things like view man pages in a separate window if they need to be referred to.
I've seen that this behavior can be turned off using a command line option to xterm to set an X resource, but I'm guessing there is an stty or termcap tweak that would also do the trick. More simply I've found that setting the terminal type to vt100 gets rid of this behavior, though probably at the expense of other capabilities.
Is there a better way of specifically eliminating this behavior?
I'd like to see a GUI terminal emulator like ROXTerm include a configuration setting to enable/disable this behavior, or better yet, some functionality added to the GUI that permits dynamically cycling through the available buffers or optionally presenting them as one merged buffer.
-Tom
