How to increase scrollback for FreeBSD-4.10?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-08-16 09:21, doug at polands.org wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 03:09:30PM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 06:58:57AM -0700, Mike wrote:
> > > When I'm on the 4.10 box the scrollback is about 200 lines. If
> > > possible I'd like to set the scroll back to 600 lines or so
> > > (at least).
> > >
> > > Question: How do I increase the scrollback on 4.10?
> >
> > That depends on the console program you're using.  For an xterm(1),
> > the following in ~/.Xdefaults will give you 8k scrollback lines:
> >
> >     xterm*saveLines:        8192
>
> xterm like programs allow the -sl switch lines.  I've had problems with
> numbers approaching 32767 but have never nailed down exactly how many
> lines I can save.  I safely use -sl 30000 for xterm, rxvt, aterm, and
> gnome-terminal.

I use screen most of the time in my terminal sessions, which also
includes a nice option for scrollback.  Putting the following in my
~/.screenrc file works like a charm:

        defscrollback 10000

This is IMHO a bit more preferable than using syscons scrollback,
because syscons allocates memory inside the kernel for the scrollback
buffer IIRC.  I tend to prefer userspace allocations when possible, like
the xterm -sl or screen's scrollback.