Atuin+Tmux scrollback help

Hello all - strange issue I’m experiencing.

When I use atuin inside tmux, the main atuin window Ctrl+R is left in my tmux scrollback history.

Ive replicated this on both Ghostty, and Terminal.app, with the latest version of tmux, atuin, ghostty, and terminal.app.

The strange part is, its seems dependent on terminal size - that is, its $LINES and $COLUMNS (and maybe font-size) dependant.

I discovered this while trying to debug on the ghostty discord.

Initially, it wasn’t happening on Terminal.app, but it was on Ghostty. Eventually I got it down to being font size dependent on ghostty - if my font size was larger than 16, it would happen, but 15 or smaller, it would not. They suggested I try matching the $LINES and $COLUMNS (by resizing the window) on Terminal.app and see if it happened there - it did. So now I know it isnt a ghostty issue

This happens with no tmux config, and no/default atuin config.

Try put this in your ~/.tmux.conf:

set-window-option -g alternate-screen on

It seems that atuin uses altscreen or not depending on the terminal size.

Try put this in your ~/.tmux.conf:

I tried it, but it still happens depending on size

It seems that atuin uses altscreen or not depending on the terminal size.

Yeah this is what I think as well - should I post about this on github?

For what its worth, I searched the github issues for “alternate-screen” and came to this comment by jyn514:

i was looking for the reverse, to force atuin to use the alternate screen. it turns out the current way to do that is to set inline_height = 0 (which apparently means ‘full-screen’).

which fixed my issue.

Still not sure if this is a bug or should at least be documented somewhere

It’s not really a bug. If you want to use the altscreen, then we MUST fill the screen. Vice versa - lots of users complained about atuin taking over their whole screen, so we switched to using a small portion of it. Naturally, this meant no more alt screen by default.

Got it - makes sense - maybe worth documenting somewhere? Actually not sure if anyone else has this problem lol

Seeing an invocation of atuin x 50 times throughout my tmux scrollback history made it hard to track things down.

1 Like