In bug #2905143 I described a problem where if I start a
new ROXTerm (1.15.0) tab with a command like:

roxterm --tab --tab-name SZ1 -e ssh -t sz /bin/bash --login -c \'screen -D s1
\|\| screen -r s1 \|\| screen -S s1\'

I always have to then use Edit | Reset before the scrollbar in ROXTerm will

work. Prior to running reset, the scrollbar selector occupies the full

hight of the scrollbar, as if the program hasn't seen more than one screen

of content.

Further testing showed the problem was not specific to ROXTerm, but showed up
in other emulators using the VTE library.

While that means this isn't a ROXTerm bug (so I'll file something against
VTE), I'm still looking for a way to work around the problem. That could be
somehow injecting a process between screen and ROXTerm to filter out the
problematic escape sequence, customizing the termcap to eliminate or change
the function to something inocuous, or modifying ROXTerm such that it tells
VTE to behave differently (if that's possible).

A termcap modification is probably the easiest thing to do, but to do that
will require identifying the escape sequence that causes this. Is there a
ROXTerm debug or logging mode that might facilitate capturing the code? Any
recommendation for where to find documentation on escape codes?

A termcap modification is probably the easiest thing to do...

I searched through VTE's bug database to see if there were any existing
relevant bugs, which led me to one on gnome-terminal integration with screen
(and ssh, both of which I had on the wishlist for ROXTerm):

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332148

and then one titled "Mimic xterm's scrollback and terminfo WRT screen":

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420117

which led to the Debian bugs:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=326227

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=326094

They included a .screenrc config file tweak as a workaround:

# See: [url]http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=326094[/url]
#
# To get screen to add lines to xterm's scrollback buffer, uncomment the
# following termcapinfo line which tells xterm to use the normal screen buffer
# (which has scrollback), not the alternate screen buffer.
#
termcapinfo xterm|xterms|xs|rxvt ti@:te@

I was skeptical, given that when I first ran across problems with alternate
buffers not working as desired, things didn't work any better in xterm, and
this bug claimed that xterm had the desired behavior, while VTE-based
emulators didn't.

I gave it a try anyway, and it work. That was surprisingly easy to fix.

-Tom