xterm dump of full scrollable window content

Question

I want to know if anyone does know a way to dump or copy the whole lot of viewable messages in a xterm window on linux. The very important thing is I don't want to know how to send a command out and kapture its output for stream 1 and 2 as well as the input, as this is well known to me.

I may explain for what this is needed. You do something and expect not any complications but than you got pages of msg's als err msg or normal output. To be able to see later after it you should be able to get them in a file and as long as you are able to scroll that all back and forther with your mouse it is sure the data is there some where. But the time may be not to scroll and screenshot and scroll ....

I would be glad to help me out in such cases and it would be fine to have the full view including all your own typing and all the msg's in same order as you watch it when you scroll it back.

I don't really know where this is stored and how you could get that saved. I know that I could dump the whole lot of Memory and search it for a part of the xterm window, but that is a bit over the top I think.

Answer 1

There is a control sequence, which I had forgotten. This question reminded me. In XTerm Control Sequences, it is noted "print all pages":

CSI ? Pm i
      Media Copy (MC, DEC-specific).
        Ps = 1  -> Print line containing cursor.
        Ps = 4  -> Turn off autoprint mode.
        Ps = 5  -> Turn on autoprint mode.
        Ps = 1  0  -> Print composed display, ignores DECPEX.
        Ps = 1  1  -> Print all pages.

That dates from 1999 (patch #119), so you likely have it in your xterm. You could do this in a shell command like this:

printf '\033[?11i'

A comment mentions the page Hidden gems of xterm, which uses the corresponding action print-everything (something that can be executed via the translations resource). It is in the manual page, of course. The same comment points to Extra characters in XTerm printerCommand output, which mentions the resource printAttributes. By default, the control sequences for the printer tell xterm to send extra control characters (to reconstruct video attributes). The resource can be modified (set to 0) to suppress that. That is even older (patch #74).

Without that — Conceivably one could construct an application which used the X SendEvent protocol to construct a series of events which would be interpreted as xterm actions to scroll back, select text and copy it chunk-by-chunk via the clipboard. You could even write it in Perl (there is a module for X protocol). But seriously, no.

If you want to capture text which was written to xterm, you can do this by preparing before the text is needed by different methods (see manual):

• turn on the xterm logging feature (not that user-friendly because it generates the filename). This can be enabled using the "Log to File (logging)" menu entry.
• use the printer control sequences to write lines as they are written (again, not that friendly, though there is a menu entry to turn it on and off, "Redirect to Printer (print-redir)")
• use script to capture all output to the terminal. I use this, because it works with any terminal on any POSIX-like system (even Cygwin).

Each of these methods produces a file containing escape/control sequences, which requires filtering out. The hypothetical program using SendEvent could in principle eliminate that.