Improve naming of write_screen_fileand write_scrollback_file

[00-kat]

Incredibly confusing names; people have gotten confused about it before (e.g. #2040, #3496). The default bindings also use write_scrollback_file instead of write_screen_file which I don't think is intentional. And here's a conversation where @jcollie and I get confused about what the two do, as well: https://discord.com/channels/1005603569187160125/1005603569711452192/1322424870025302037.

I remember there was talk about improving them in the Discord, but I couldn't find any existing issues/discussions about it, so I decided to make one.

[Integralist]

👋🏻

I came here to ask about write_scrollback_file and if someone could give me an example use case as I don't understand its purpose 😬

I think it is for when you execute a command and you want to have the output automatically written to a temporary file.

For example, back when I was using Warp, who just truncate long output (seriously annoying and won't let you configure it to be larger) I typically had to remember to pipe to tee whatever | tee /tmp/output so if (for example) my very large test suite failed I could see all the relevant output.

So I'm presuming write_scrollback_file would do this automatically and save me from having to do any manual piping.

Do I have that correct or am I completely mistaken and it's useful for some other purpose? 😅

Thanks for any advice/guidance.

[00-kat]

Until #189, write_screen_file is the easiest way to search for text on the screen.

[bulletmark]

I quite like the simple idea of vim ctrl+shift+j to easily be able to search and/or mine my screen history. However, I find it very odd that the current screen is not included in the scroll-back record. Then I found issue #3496 and this discussion to discover write_screen_file exists. Surely that is what 99% of users would prefer and thus should be the default for ctrl+shift+j?

[00-kat]

That's what I had thought too. I actually can't determine what the purpose of write_scrollback_file is...

[00-kat]

N.B.: the default binding was now changed to use write_screen_file. #5285