scrollti

A small CLI tool that takes piped output and displays it in a fixed scrolling window, showing only the last N lines in-place instead of flooding your terminal.

Usage

some-command | scrollti -n 10

Build

gcc -Wall -o scrollti scrollti.c

Install

sudo mv scrollti /usr/local/bin/scrollti

Options

Flag	Default	Description
-n, --lines	10	Number of lines to show in the window
-highlight <regex>	—	Highlight matching text using a regex
-hcolor <color>	green	Highlight color (green, red, yellow)

Examples

Basic scrolling

make | scrollti -n 15

Highlight matches

make | scrollti -n 15 -highlight "error"

Highlight with color

make | scrollti -n 15 -highlight "warning|error" -hcolor yellow

Demo

for i in $(seq 1 100); do
  echo "STEP $i processing..."
  sleep 0.02
done | scrollti -n 10 -highlight "STEP [0-9]+" -hcolor green

Notes

• Designed for streaming logs and command output
• Works best with line-buffered input
• Output from parallel processes (e.g. Docker/Podman builds) may appear interleaved
• Keeps memory bounded by a fixed internal limit

License

MIT