Displayed text completely scrolls off the top of the most screen in "follow" mode.

[HippoPerson]

In this latest version of most, when issuing the "F" command to follow the growth of a file, the displayed text soon completely scrolls off the screen.

I'm running under Debian linux version 13.

I have an 80x60 urxvt window open with export LINES=60 and export COLUMNS=80 explicitly set.

I've created a file called /tmp/foo with the following initial contents:

Line 1
Line 2

Line 3

Then, within that urxvt window, I run most /tmp/foo and issue the "F" command to get most to follow the growth of the file.

Then, in another terminal window, I create the following alias:

alias testit='( date; echo abc; date; echo xyz; date; echo ) >>/tmp/foo'

And in that other terminal window, I then repeatedly run this testit alias.

At first, the text which is appended to /tmp/foo properly shows up at the bottom of the most screen as the older text properly scrolls upward.

But after a number of iterations of invoking testit, most starts displaying the added text followed by some blank lines at the end, so that the latest added text shows up higher and higher in the displayed most screen.

And after a few more iterations of testit, the newly added text has completely scrolled off the top of the most screen, which is now showing as completely blank.

If I exit from "follow" mode with Ctrl-C and then issue the "B" command to scroll to the bottom of the screen, all the newly added text now indeed shows properly in the most display. And if I then re-issue the "F" command, "follow" mode is again properly showing the bottom 60 lines of the /tmp/foo file.

But again, after a number of iterations of testit, the followed text again scrolls off the top of the screen and is replaced with blanks, so that once again, most is displaying an empty buffer.

This is 100-percent repeatable, no matter how many times I continue to perform this same test sequence.

It seems like most is somehow getting confused about the display screen dimensions and/or the display screen state when running in "follow" mode.

[jedsoft]

Thanks for the detailed bug report. Please see if the latest commits addresses this. --John On Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:44:07 -0800, TheHippoMan ***@***.***> said:

HippoPerson created an issue (jedsoft/most#32) In this latest version of most, when issuing the "F" command to follow the growth of a file, the displayed text soon completely scrolls off the screen.

[...]

[HippoPerson]

Thank you very much for your response.

Your latest commit indeed seems to fix this "follow mode" issue.

And also, the new "-F" command-line flag that you've now implemented also is something that I have wanted.

So thank you for all of this!

Actually, in my local downloaded version of "most" that I've been playing with, I added the following case to "do_switches()" in "most.c" in order allow any command to be pushed into the "getkey" buffer upon startup ...

   case 'p':
     /* Push the specified character onto the front of the getkey 
      * buffer, in order to cause the associated command to be
      * invoked at startup time.
      */
     ch = *str++;
     if (ch != '\0')
       {
         SLang_ungetkey(ch);
       }
     break;

This allowed me to do "most -pF filename" to start up in "follow mode", as well as being able to push any other desired commands into the "getkey" buffer at start-up. It's analagous to the "+" command-line option of the "less" utility.

Of course, we don't need this "-pF" construct any more, now that we have this new "-F" option, but perhaps my idea about pushing commands into the "getkey" buffer at startup might be a nice future addition to "most".

Thank you again for all your work on this!