mjhjmtu

In a terminal, are there any shortcuts to jump to a previous/next prompt? Scrolling up and trying to find the start of a log slows down my workflow.

I'm using iTerm on OSX, but this should be applicable to any Unix terminals. A solution in Tmux would help as well.

Inside tmux v2.4+
(relevant commit), you can define a binding to jump to the last prompts with acceptable reliability:

bind-key b copy-mode;
 send-keys -X start-of-line;
 send-keys -X search-backward " "

Where the " " is a non-breaking space and a corresponding change is made to have you shell prompt contain it ($PS1 or $PROMPT_COMMAND in bash).

It may require special care to set it in the shell prompt and the tmux configuration, as it could be changed to regular space during copy-paste operations (see method with vim in the comments).

Alternatively, you can try your favorite alternative unicode space character or anything that occurs rarely in command outputs and that you're ready to accept seeing in your prompt (🍌?).

This could also be a combination of several characters for even less false positives. It's probably better to pick something at the very end of the prompt, though, for easier navigation.

Credit:

• 
  https://github.com/salcode/ironcode-tmux/issues/21 for the use of the non-breaking space and the binding. I first thought this could be a use case of the zero-width space but it did not seem to work.


• 
  robenk for pointing out that copy-pasting weird character spaces is not always reliable

If you use less to view the contents of the log file, you have the ability to scroll back and forth using the Space and b keys (see the less manual). You may also perform searches in the output with / (and ? for backward search).

To view the output from a program in less, simply pipe the output to it:

$ ./myprogram | less

To additionally save the output in a file:

$ ./myprogram | tee myprogram.out | less

If you press F while reading a file that's being written to, less will behave like tail -f. To interrupt this, press Ctrl+c.