Search and prompts

The find bar

Edit → Find…, Ctrl+Shift+F (Cmd+F), opens a bar at the top right of the pane. It searches the whole scrollback and the screen as you type, highlights every match in the theme’s yellow, and outlines the current one. In a split tab each pane has a bar of its own, and the chord opens the active pane’s.

The search starts at the newest match, at the bottom of what you are looking at, and works up: a terminal is usually searched for something recent. Stepping wraps at either end. A match out of view is scrolled to the middle of the pane.

The bar shows where you are, such as 3 of 17, or No matches. The count stops at 1000 and says 1000+. Closing the bar drops the highlights.

What matches

• Case is smart. A query in lower case matches either case; a capital anywhere makes it exact, so error finds Error and ERROR, and Error finds only Error.
• .* in the bar switches to a regular expression. One that does not compile yet, because you are still typing it, says Invalid rather than reporting no matches.
• A word that wrapped at the right edge is found as one word.
• Double-width characters, such as CJK, match as the text they are.
• Matches stay on their text as output arrives, and are found again after the pane is resized.

Find Next and Find Previous

They work from anywhere, not only from the bar, and open it when it is closed. Off macOS the pair is GNOME Terminal’s; on macOS it is the system’s, since Cmd+H hides the application.

Select something first and Find uses it: a selection on one line, up to 200 characters, becomes the query.

Shell integration

A shell can tell the terminal where each prompt starts, where a command’s output starts, and how the command ended, with OSC 133 marks. With them, three commands in the Edit menu work:

A prompt you jump to lands at the top of the pane. Select Last Output has no chord; it is in the Edit menu and the command palette, and the Keyboard page of Settings can give it one.

A command that failed, one that exited with a status other than 0, gets a short bar in the theme’s red in the left margin of its prompt, so the one that broke can be found in a screen of output. Commands that succeeded get nothing.

Without marks, the three commands are greyed in the Edit menu, and the command palette lists them greyed with the reason. The marks are recorded on the normal screen, not while a full-screen program such as vim has the alternate one, and they stay on their prompts when the pane is resized.

Setting up bash and zsh

Some shells and prompt frameworks send the marks by themselves. For bash, add this to ~/.bashrc:

PS0='\e]133;C\a'
PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\e]133;D;%s\a\e]133;A\a" "$?"'"${PROMPT_COMMAND:+;$PROMPT_COMMAND}"

For zsh, add this to ~/.zshrc:

_termina_precmd() { local s=$?; print -n "\e]133;D;$s\a\e]133;A\a" }
_termina_preexec() { print -n "\e]133;C\a" }
precmd_functions=(_termina_precmd $precmd_functions)
preexec_functions+=(_termina_preexec)

Both keep whatever your prompt already runs before each prompt. Open a new tab for the change to take effect; the shells already running have not read it.

• A marks where a prompt starts.
• C marks where a command’s output starts, sent just before the command runs.
• D marks where it ended, with its exit status.