I have heard this from a lot of people, yet here I am, using a terminal that supports this, and have yet to ever do it.
Can you help me understand what workflows you depend on Ctrl+f for? I wonder if I am missing something big.
Don't you ever need to search through a program's output; e.g., to find what failed? Otherwise you'll have to remember to tee everything to a file every time you run a command.
You know, I can't remember ever doing this in a terminal. Not because it doesn't sound useful (it sounds VERY useful), it just sort-of never occurred to me as a thing you could do. It's just muscle memory at this point to rerun the command with a pipe to a pager and search there.
I get ya, but this would be more of my case if my terminal didn't have scrollback search available (or if I really wanted to scrutinize the output carefully).
In foot I just ctrl+shift+r and search back the references one-by-one in a mode, which I guess is 90% of my use case for scrollback.
I guess that's what I always do. or grep or awk or sed.. Maybe if a program takes hours to return it's helpful to be able to search the terminal, but otherwise i'm just pushing up with my arrow and `| grep -v UGLY | grep BEAUTIFUL`
It could take a long time to run, and my time is not free. The native MacOS terminal has a buffer search, why doesn't ghostty? It is a rudimentary feature.
You can map something like cmd+shift+f to open the entire buffer in your default text editor, this has been sufficient for a lot of folks - myself included - while we wait for native scrollback search to land.
I started using it months ago and don't miss that so much, if I really can't rerun the command and pipe it to less/grep. I'll just use the mouse to copy it to the clipboard and then run `xclip -o` (linux) or `pbpaste` (mac) and pipe it to grep. I know there's a keybinding for putting the buffer in a file, but copying with the mouse is faster than finding it.
Also, not sure if this is by default or it picked it up from my old iTerm2 configuration, but cmd+shift+up/down navigates through prompt lines so it's easy to find the start of a long command. My PS1 in zsh is:
As someone who lives in the terminal, I can't say I've ever had the need to do that. It's only by reading the comments that I've realised that there's no search in Ghostty.