Ghostty Scrollback Search Workaround

The issue

#189 on the Ghostty repo to be exact: Search Scrollback. In good old Terminal.app the system default lets you search the currently visible scrollback text - especially helpful for long running make builds or install scripts.

Deeper

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Moria… You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum… shadow and flame.

–Saruman the White

After consulting these hidden comments (actually I asked Claude first and did not feel confident in the response so I googled my way to the source of Claude’s answer), I discovered the write_scrollback_file keybinding action:

Write the entire scrollback into a temporary file with the specified action. The action determines what to do with the filepath.

Where copy, paste, and open are the available actions. Its the open action that is of particular interest to us:

The default OS editor is determined by using open on macOS and xdg-open on Linux.

This means we can override default open app on macOS, and bind a key in ghostty that will open the scrollback text in that application.

Enter Geovim

To accomplish this, we’re going to create a ghostty terminal that launches neovim (Geovim1 if you will) using macOS’ built in Automator application.

automator

Automator.app

The application simply runs the following shell script:

open -n -a Ghostty --args -e /opt/homebrew/bin/nvim -- $@

Which does open-ception to open Ghostty in a new window that immediately executes Neovim, with the rest of the input passed as arguments (be sure to change this and the shell in their respective dropdowns).

Once the app is created, you can set it as the default application to open text files with:

defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices/com.apple.launchservices.secure LSHandlers -array-add '{
    LSHandlerContentType = "public.plain-text";
    LSHandlerRoleAll = "com.apple.automator.Geovim";
}'

I believe there is some command or series of commands to refresh the handler cache, but I just restarted my laptop 😎.

Putting it all together

Finally, have the write_scrollback keyboard action bound to ⌘ + f:

keybind = super+f=write_scrollback_file:open

And voila, scrollback search in Geovim.

Caveats

Obviously you’ve just set the default plain text editor globally for the system to hack this into existence, but as someone who doesn’t have graphical editor installed, Geovim actually comes in quite handy sometimes.

1Originally I named it GhosttyNvim, but that started jockeying for first position in my spotlight autocomplete with Ghostty itself.