The problem#
When writing a blog post like last time's, I often will be at least partway through the process before I realize it's interesting enough to write a post on. Then I need to somehow go back and reconstruct a narrative of the troubleshooting steps I performed.
The solution#
As long as I still have the terminals or screen sessions
open, I can at least capture a snapshot of the scrollback history that's
still available.
In Xfce Terminal (and likely similar in other terminals), I can
save the history by going into the "Edit" menu and selecting "Select
All" and then "Copy" (plain text) or "Copy as HTML" (to also capture
styles) and pasting into a file or writing the clipboard to a file
using xclip:
xclip -o -selection clipboard > some_file.html
In screen, the hardcopy command
can be used
to dump the full history to a file. Type
Ctrl+a, : to get into command mode and
run the command hardcopy -h to include the entire scrollback buffer.
Unfortunately, this is plain text only.
If you use tmux instead of screen, the equivalent is
the capture-pane command which does support saving
styles if you provide the -e option. Note this
encodes the styles so cating the file to a terminal will look
right, not in HTML as Xfce Terminal does; you could convert it to HTML
using aha.