Sometimes you just have a command write output.

I'm still not quite sure what you mean. You can still {|,>} output from a program, so less and grep still help.

Or do you mean when you inevitably forget? Well then yeah you're at the mercy of your terminal but as others mentioned ghostty has a hack to help as well as some other terminals. But this should also help reinforce why you should pipe more often and write to files (or tee). It sucks but not making the same mistakes in the future and learning better habits will help you write better code and use better practices.

But that's the age old problem of "you can't analyze the data you didn't record" and that's a footgun you'll experience in every programming language, every experiment, and across many parts of life. Better to record and throw it away than not record and regret it.

> "you can't analyze the data you didn't record"

It IS recorded. It's right there in scrollback (Literally the default buffer to record). It's easily accessible with most tooling, including nice scrolling, mouse support, find/search, etc...

Except in Ghostty, it's not so accessible. No find, no scrollbars.

I end up having to dump it into another tool, which at least they make pretty easy (ex: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#write_scro...).

Although deciding when to do that would be easier if I had a better indicator for just how much scrollback content exists. Ex - if it's 3 pages... I'll just scroll through it. If it's 3000 pages... time to dump to file.

So no - by default I use a pager... just about never. Why would I when I have absolutely everything in scrollback by default 99.9% of the time?

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Don't confuse your preferences with "correct" :P

I'm doing just fine with code and best practices, I'm simply stating that this is a rough edge on an otherwise lovely tool.

  > Don't confuse your preferences with "correct" :P

Don't overlook the point by fixating on a technicality

  > I'm doing just fine with code and best practices

Yet, you aren't following best practices

  > So no - by default I use a pager... just about never. Why would I when I have absolutely everything in scrollback by default 99.9% of the time?

Fewer capabilities. But those were already explained and not just by me. There really should be no need for such huge scrollbacks, you have history

  > I'm simply stating that this is a rough edge on an otherwise lovely tool.

No one has disagreed with this point. I think everyone even agrees

In that case are scroll bars even helpful for determining position?

My terminal history is normally huge, and the log output would be some unknown percentage of the total scrollable history.