DiceTermAlpha

Instant Replay

Rewind a pane through a rolling buffer of recent output without touching the live shell.

Instant Replay lets you scroll back through a pane's recent history as a time-stamped snapshot, separate from the normal scrollback. The live shell keeps running while you browse.

How it works

Every pane keeps a ring buffer of serialized snapshots, captured roughly every two seconds. The buffer holds up to 150 snapshots, covering approximately five minutes of terminal history. When the buffer is full, the oldest snapshot is dropped to make room for the newest.

Press Ctrl+Shift+B to open the scrubber. The pane freezes at the current moment; your shell continues running in the background.

The scrubber

The scrubber overlays the pane with a slider and a position counter like 5 / 150. Three ways to move through it:

Action How
Step backward / forward ← / → arrow keys
Jump to any point Drag the slider
Return to live Press Esc or click Back to live

Closing the scrubber with Esc immediately restores the live view — you won't miss output that arrived while you were browsing.

Per-pane, not persisted

Instant Replay is per-pane. Each pane has its own independent ring buffer; rewinding one pane has no effect on others.

The buffer is not saved to disk. When DiceTerm quits and relaunches, session restore brings back the full xterm scrollback (which covers a longer window), but the snapshot ring starts fresh.

Tips

Tip: Instant Replay is useful when a command scrolled something important off the screen before you could read it. Open the scrubber, step back a few snapshots, and the output is right there — no re-running needed.

See also