Tutorial

Navigate & select without the mouse

Once your hands are on the home row, reaching for the trackpad to scroll back, grab a URL, or copy the output of the last command is the slow path. Sinclair lets you do all of it from the keyboard: search the scrollback, jump between prompts, follow links by keystroke, and drive a vi-style cursor to select exactly what you want. This walkthrough runs through each one in the order you'll reach for them.

1. Confirm shell integration is on

Almost everything below leans on one prerequisite, and the good news is you already have it: shell integration is on by default (the shell-integration config key). Sinclair injects OSC 133 prompt marks and OSC 7 working-directory reporting into zsh, bash, and fish purely through environment variables — it never touches your .zshrc, .bashrc, or fish config. Those marks are how Sinclair knows where each command begins and ends, which is what powers jump-to-prompt, command-output grabbing, and semantic search in the steps that follow.

2. Search the scrollback

Press ⌘F (toggle_search) to open an in-place search overlay over the current pane's scrollback. As you type, every match highlights live and the view scrolls to the nearest hit — you see results before you finish the word. The query is fully editable: a caret tracks your position and the cursor keys move through it, so you can refine a search instead of retyping it. Matching is case-insensitive, and the next/previous controls walk through matches in order. Press ⎋ to dismiss the overlay and drop back into the buffer.

3. Search by command, not by line

Sometimes you don't want a raw text match — you want the command that printed this. ⌘⇧F (toggle_semantic_search) searches a level up: instead of matching individual lines, it searches across logical prompt/output blocks, each command you ran and the output it produced. That turns "scroll until I find it" into a direct hit on the block you're after.

4. Jump between prompts

A single command can bury the screen in output. Rather than scroll it by hand, jump straight to the prompt marks: ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ (jump_to_prompt:-1 and jump_to_prompt:1) move the viewport between shell prompts recorded in the scrollback. It's the fastest way to skip back over a long block of output to the command that produced it, or forward again to the latest prompt.

5. Grab a command's output in one keystroke

Because shell integration marks where each command's output begins and ends, Sinclair treats the space between two prompts as a block. Press ⌘⇧O (copy_command_output) and it copies the output of the most recent finished command straight to the clipboard — the rows between the two newest prompt marks, or from the last prompt to the bottom while a command is still running. No selecting, no scrolling: run a command, then grab exactly what it printed.

6. Follow links by keystroke

When output is full of URLs, hint mode saves you the round trip to the mouse. Press ⌘⇧U (hints) and Sinclair labels every visible URL with a short home-row keystroke, Vimium-style. Type a label to open that link in your browser — bare www.… domains get an https:// scheme automatically. Backspace corrects a mistyped label; ⎋ or any impossible prefix cancels the whole thing.

7. Select with the keyboard

To copy an arbitrary region — not a whole command's output, but the exact span you want — use copy mode. ⌘⇧Space (copy_mode) drops a vi-style cursor onto the viewport and scrollback so you can select without touching the mouse. Movement follows vi conventions:

• h j k l or the arrow keys — move the cursor (it scrolls the view when it leaves the screen)
• w / b — step a column; 0 / $ — line start / end; g / G — top / bottom
• v — begin a selection; move to extend it
• y or Enter — yank the selection and exit; ⎋ — exit

8. Let smart selection grab whole tokens

When you do click, Sinclair makes each click count. Double-clicking selects the whole meaningful token under the pointer — a URL, an email address, a filesystem path, or a git-style hex hash — instead of a single whitespace-delimited word, falling back to word selection when there's no token there. Triple-click still selects the whole logical line. It's on by default; set smart-select = false to restore plain word selection.

9. Search every tab at once

Where ⌘F searches the current pane, ⌘⌥F (search_all) opens a fuzzy picker over recent output from every tab. Type to filter across all your sessions at once; each result is labelled with its tab number, and choosing one focuses that tab. It's the answer to "which window did I run that in?" — the one keystroke that finds a line no matter where it scrolled past.

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