scrollbar for terminal window

[nektro]

helps to quickly get to the top when the output buffer is really long

[mitchellh]

Going to mark this as a GTK enhancement because I don't think we're going to support GUI elements like scrollbars in systems such as GLFW, otherwise we'd have to render it ourself and I'm not super interested in doing that. 😄

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.Scrollbar.html

[mitchellh]

My last comment is so old we didn't have an AppKit apprt so I'm going to remove the linux specificity on this.

[mitchellh]

From #2524:

AppKit apps get all this for free when using an NSScrollView. I'm guessing since Ghostty renders using metal, using an NSScrollView isn't super convenient. But the suggestion from here is maybe workable: https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/651229

That is, have a dummy NSView as the NSScrollView's documentView and sync its size using a technique similar to https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/NSScrollViewGuide/Articles/SynchroScroll.html

This looks like something to try.

Note that core changes are necessary to enable this too since our Screen and PageList structure at the time of writing this have no way to know min/max/position.

[TheWeirdDev]

Kitty draws a non-interactive scrollbar in the recent versions. I think it's pretty useful even though you can't click it, you still know where you are.

[nico]

From #2524:

AppKit apps get all this for free when using an NSScrollView. I'm guessing since Ghostty renders using metal, using an NSScrollView isn't super convenient. But the suggestion from here is maybe workable: https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/651229
That is, have a dummy NSView as the NSScrollView's documentView and sync its size using a technique similar to https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/NSScrollViewGuide/Articles/SynchroScroll.html

This looks like something to try.

Note that core changes are necessary to enable this too since our Screen and PageList structure at the time of writing this have no way to know min/max/position.

In case it's useful to anyone, here's a hacky proof-of-concept of a SwiftUI app hosting an NSScrollView that then itself hosts another SwiftUI view that has a metal view and another SwiftUI view as child. The NSScrollView's document view (the thing that's scrolled around) is a dummy 20k x 10k view (larger than the max metal size), but the metal view is only as large as the scroll view's visible area. The metal view is a child of the document view, and its position on the document view is updated to keep it always visible.

This seems to work.

(The other somewhat common approach is to instead give the NSScrollView a custom NSClipView subclass and handle drawing that way. https://github.com/Tinrocket-LLC/TRMetalImageView does this, but it looks a bit more involved.)

MetalSwiftUI.zip

[marklap]

Non-interactive scrollback visual indicator sounds great; interactive scrollbar sounds good too. Personally, I think an interactive scrollback minimap (like extraterm, vscode, sublimetext) would be killer.

[pluiedev]

Please don't add any more comments to the effect of "+1" or "I want this". Instead, indicate your desire by reacting 👍🏼 to the issue itself, or even this comment. However, feel free to add any concrete suggestions or prior art as to how to design this feature.

People (especially busy volunteer developers) are notified every time someone adds a new comment, and it's not helpful when comments like these add no value and don't contribute directly to the feature's design and inclusion. If need be, this issue may be locked to contributors only.

[pluiedev]

Looks like my warning was not heeded. Locking to collaborators.