Scrollback Search

Scrollback mode captures content from your tmux pane’s scrollback buffer and presents it in fzf for fuzzy searching. It has two views that you can toggle between with Ctrl+T:

• Lines view – deduplicated scrollback lines, most-recent-first. Use this to search for commands, output, or error messages.
• Tokens view (extract) – structured tokens extracted from scrollback: URLs, file paths with line numbers, git commit hashes, IP addresses, UUIDs, and diff paths. Use this to quickly act on specific items from your terminal output.

How to access

• Type $ from files mode to open the lines view – the remainder of your query becomes the search term.
• Type & from files mode to open the tokens (extract) view directly.
• Or bind a dedicated key via @dispatch-extract-key to open tokens view without going through files mode.
• Or bind a dedicated key via @dispatch-scrollback-key to open scrollback in the default view.

Keybindings

Lines view

Key	Action
Enter	Copy selected line(s) to tmux buffer + system clipboard
Ctrl+O	Paste selection into originating pane
Ctrl+T	Switch to tokens (extract) view
Tab / Shift+Tab	Toggle selection (multi-select)
Backspace on empty	Return to files (home)
Ctrl+D / Ctrl+U	Scroll preview down/up
?	Show help cheat sheet in preview
Escape	Close popup

Tokens view (extract)

Key	Action
Enter	Copy selected token(s) to tmux buffer + system clipboard
Ctrl+O	Smart open: browser for URLs, editor for file:line, clipboard for others
Ctrl+T	Switch to lines view
Tab / Shift+Tab	Toggle selection (multi-select)
Backspace on empty	Return to files (home)
Ctrl+/	Filter by token type (cycles: all → url → path → …)
Ctrl+D / Ctrl+U	Scroll preview down/up
?	Show help cheat sheet in preview
Escape	Close popup

Token types

The tokens view extracts seven types of structured data from your scrollback:

Type	Example	Smart open action
url	https://example.com/path	Open in browser
path	src/main.rs:42 or lib/utils.js:10:5	Open file at line in editor
file	README.md (bare file, must exist on disk)	Open file in editor
hash	abc1234 (7-40 hex chars)	git show in pane (or copy)
ip	192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1:8080	Copy to clipboard
uuid	550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000	Copy to clipboard
diff	src/main.rs (from +++ b/ lines)	Open file in editor

Features

• Two views, one mode – Ctrl+T toggles between lines and tokens views without leaving the popup. The prompt, border label, and help overlay update to reflect the active view.
• Deduplication – duplicate lines (or tokens) are removed so you see each unique item only once.
• Reverse order – the most recent items appear first, so the output you just saw is at the top of the list.
• Context preview – the preview pane shows surrounding context from the scrollback buffer for both views.
• Multi-select – use Tab and Shift+Tab to select multiple items before copying or acting.
• Smart open – Ctrl+O in tokens view dispatches to the right action based on token type: browser for URLs, editor at line for file paths, clipboard for everything else.
• ANSI stripping – escape codes are stripped before token extraction, so colored terminal output doesn’t break regex matching.
• Configurable default view – set @dispatch-scrollback-view to tokens to land in tokens view by default.
• Browser detection – URL opening uses $BROWSER if set, then tries xdg-open (Linux) or open (macOS). If no browser is found, the URL is copied to the clipboard instead.

Configuration

Option	Default	Description
@dispatch-scrollback-lines	10000	Number of scrollback lines to capture from the originating pane
@dispatch-scrollback-view	lines	Default view when entering scrollback mode: lines or tokens
@dispatch-extract-key	none	Prefix-free key to open scrollback directly in tokens view (disabled by default)
@dispatch-scrollback-key	none	Prefix-free key to open scrollback in default view (disabled by default)

Custom Token Patterns

You can define custom token types by creating a configuration file at ~/.config/tmux-dispatch/patterns.conf. Custom patterns appear alongside built-in types in the tokens view, with automatically assigned colors from a cycling bright palette.

Override the file location with the tmux option @dispatch-patterns-file.

Format

Each line defines a pattern using pipe-separated fields:

TYPE | REGEX
TYPE | REGEX | ACTION

• TYPE – lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens only; max 10 characters. Cannot shadow built-in types (url, path, file, hash, ip, uuid, diff, email, semver, color).

• REGEX – ERE regex (grep -oE compatible). Pipes inside the regex are fine; only `

  ` (space-pipe-space) is used as a delimiter.

• ACTION – optional. Defaults to copy (copies to clipboard on Ctrl+O).

Disabling built-in types

Prefix a type name with ! to disable it:

!semver
!color

Example

# Custom patterns
jira | [A-Z]+-[0-9]+
aws-arn | arn:aws:[a-z0-9-]+:[a-z0-9-]*:[0-9]*:[a-zA-Z0-9/:-]+

# Disable built-in types I don't need
!color
!semver

Comments (lines starting with #) and blank lines are ignored.

Use Ctrl+/ in tokens view to filter by type – custom types appear alongside built-in ones in the cycle.

Tips

• The number of captured lines is configurable via @dispatch-scrollback-lines. Increase it if you frequently need to search further back, or decrease it for faster startup on slower machines.
• From files mode, type $error to instantly search your scrollback for “error” – the $ switches to scrollback and error becomes the query.
• Multi-select is especially useful for copying multiple related lines (e.g., a multi-line stack trace or a sequence of commands).
• Scrollback captures text from the pane where you opened the popup, not all panes. If you need text from a different pane, switch to that pane first.
• Set @dispatch-extract-key to a key like M-u if you frequently want to jump straight to token extraction without going through files mode first.
• If no tokens are found but scrollback has content, the mode automatically falls back to lines view with a notification.