How to disable "auto-scroll to the bottom of the terminal window" in WSL while running a process?

Question

The scroll bar in WSL is not usable while running a process. My attempts to scroll up are futile because the system automatically sets the scroll bar to the bottom of the window since there's a process running.

In my case, I invoked ./gradlew bootRun, which starts an application on 8080 and keeps printing logs. I tried to read the logs by scrolling up but any manual upward movement of scroll bar was being overridden.

Just wondering if some other Windows 10 setting is causing this or is it specific to bash or is it specific to gradle? How to fix it?

Bubo

You could try pressing pause/break, but it might make your application unresponsive while paused. – Figwort

hitting the pause/break killed the connection between the process and the terminal i.e. it looked like i had killed the process in terminal but apparently the process was still running. – Bubo

When you press another key it doesn't resume output? – Figwort

nope. the process is done as far the terminal is concerned - [2]+ Stopped ./gradlew bootRun – Bubo

superuser.com/questions/1470513/… – Eichhorn

Answer 1

I believe this is neither related to WSL nor to the shell, but to the terminal. And even in case of WSL the terminal is still conhost, which is also used by the regular Windows cmd prompt.

That said, I don't believe there's a fix / setting for this right now, but you might have luck seeing this address in the new terminal app being created currently by Microsoft. In its current state, though, I also see it auto-scrolling to the bottom for ongoing output.

Cabbagehead