Scrollback in terminal not working

[jonocodes]

I am starting a shell, not an LLM. Since claude seems to scroll at least somewhat.

When starting a shell and printing a bunch of lines, I should be able to scroll down. But in my android, scrolling on the term screen does nothing.

Then I switched to it on my desktop. And I can see the mouse wheel scrolls back through previous commands, like pressing up. But does not scroll the screen. This is likely a tmux setting?

I'm on Mac M4. With brew install tmux.

[Ark0N]

I will check this, some updates are already on the way, which android are you using?

[mtiller]

I have a similar issue just with scrolling backward to see agent output. This is with Firefox on MacOS.

[Ark0N]

Im on it :)

[Ark0N]

Fixed in v1.12.0 (PR #223). This turned out to be several distinct problems stacked on top of each other, which is why it felt so inconsistent:

@jonocodes both of your symptoms had one root cause: tmux's own client emits an alternate-screen switch as its very first bytes at attach, so shell sessions lived their whole life in xterm's alternate buffer, which has no scrollback at all. On desktop the wheel got translated into Up/Down arrow keys (that is the command-history cycling you saw), and on Android touch scrolling had nothing to scroll. Shell sessions now stay in the normal buffer, wheel and touch scroll real history, and scrolling to the top pulls the complete tmux scrollback in on demand.

@mtiller your case had two layers: Firefox reports wheel deltas in line units, which we misread as pixels (about 4x too slow), and xterm's internal scroller was swallowing wheel events before our forwarding logic ever ran, so scrolling back through agent output fought the terminal and broke entirely after tab switches or reloads. Both fixed: wheel and touch now scroll Claude's own transcript directly with the input box staying pinned, on desktop and phones alike.

Please update (install.sh update, the in-app updater, or npm i -g aicodeman) and let us know if anything still misbehaves on your setups.

[mtiller]

@Ark0N scrolling is still not right even with 1.12.0. I downloaded it and tried it out. A few symptoms.

On my phone, scrolling sometimes goes back a very limited amount, sometimes it repeats blocks of text. Very unreliable (Safari under iOS). On my Mac running Firefox mouse scrolling doesn't seem to work at all, but if I do Fn - Up Arrow, I can page back through the text and it looks intact (unlike when I scroll on my phone).

[Ark0N]

Reopening, and thanks for the quick retest!

The Fn+Up detail is genuinely useful: intact content there means the terminal buffer itself is healthy, so on Firefox it's specifically the mouse wheel input path that's dead. Two quick questions to narrow it down:

• Firefox: external mouse or trackpad? And does Shift+scroll behave any differently?
• iPhone: was that a Claude session or a shell session?

One thing worth ruling out on the iPhone first: iOS Safari is known to keep running the old cached app JS after an update unless the tab is fully closed and reopened, a plain reload isn't enough. Could you kill the tab, reopen it, and see if the repeating blocks persist?

I'll dig into both in the meantime.