Feature request: CMD+F search/highlight what is on current screen

[zsimic]

I tried ghostty, and love it, but it is missing a crucial search/highlight UI feature.

It is very handy to search/highlight text on screen (and ideally, one could limit it to on-screen only, ie: do not search scrollback buffer), similarly to how iTerm's CMD+F functions.

I use typically tmux (so: no real scrollback buffer in terminal app per se), and it already provides a very nice search across the entire output in the session/window.

A super useful thing however is to be able to simply quickly highlight all mentions of a string on screen (and keep highlighting it as output changes). Would be awesome if ghostty had such a feature.

[mitchellh]

Ghostty on nightly/main has cmd+f now.

Its unclear if you're asking for a special mode of that that only searches the active area and not the scroll back.

[zsimic]

It's working beautifully otherwise. I'll dig more into my tmux setup, maybe there's something I need to fine-tune on my endd. If I ignore the number of hits found + I don't try to go next hit (which I never do anyway), then it is working perfectly well.

Now I'm not super familiar with opengl, but will be looking for nice effects, to make the highlight super nice looking (with maybe a bit of a glow ;)

[zsimic]

Also minor: currently tab goes back from the search widget to the terminal that is awesome.
However, hitting esc does not close the search widget (and stop the highlight), one has to click to close the widget.

Super minor, but if esc could close the widget (and stop highlight) that'd be fantastic.

[danielwe]

I can reproduce this, and here's one additional observation which I think gets to the heart of the issue: I can scroll the tmux history by dragging the Ghostty scrollbar.

To reproduce on macOS:

• Use an external mouse, or enable System Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars -> Always, such that the scrollbar can be flashed and grabbed
• Open tmux in Ghostty and spam some output
• Bring the mouse pointer to the right edge. The scrollbar will flash and you can grab and drag it to scroll tmux history.

This is happening without tmux's awareness, which you can tell because the tmux statusline gets scrolled out of view. If you scroll about half a screen by dragging the scrollbar, and then use a scroll wheel/touchpad gesture, you'll see the tmux itself scrolling content on the bottom half of the screen while the top half is static.

Being superficially familiar with the relevant parts of the code, I have no idea how this happens, given that the alternate screen has a hardcoded scrollback limit of zero. I know that all screens allocate extra pages for the algorithm, but there are special codepaths that are supposed to prevent you from scrolling their content when the scrollback limit is zero.

[danielwe]

However, hitting esc does not close the search widget (and stop the highlight), one has to click to close the widget.

@zsimic you just need to hit esc twice. The first esc moves focus back to the terminal so you can type at the prompt, while leaving the search widget and highlights in place. The second esc completely closes the search.

[zsimic]

Oh that's awesome! Didn't notice, but hitting esc twice is even better yes (you get one more subtle behavior possible). Thanks!!