scrollfix

A tiny shell script that resets your terminal to a sane state.

Symptoms

Your terminal is broken if you see any of these:

• Cursor has disappeared
• Clicking or scrolling produces garbage like ^[[M or ^[[<35;12;5M
• Mouse movement floods the terminal with escape sequences
• Pasting text produces garbled output or doubled characters
• Typing feels wrong or input is invisible
• less, vim, top, or another program exited uncleanly and left things messy

Just run scrollfix and it goes back to normal.

Setup

1. Put the scrollfix file somewhere in your home directory (e.g. ~/scrollfix)

2. Make it executable:

chmod u+x ~/scrollfix

3. Run it whenever your terminal is messed up:

~/scrollfix

That's it. No flags, no options.

What it does

It fixes the terminal non-destructively — your screen contents and scrollback are left untouched. (It deliberately avoids reset, which sends a hard RIS that wipes the screen and scrollback.)

1. Bails out if not run on a real terminal (safe to call from scripts/pipes)
2. stty sane — restores line discipline (echo, canonical mode, flow control)
3. DECSTR soft reset (\e[!p) — restores cursor, wrap, origin, insert mode, etc. to defaults without clearing anything
4. Ensures you're back on the main screen if a crashed TUI left you on the alternate buffer (restores it — does not clear it)
5. Clears the modes a soft reset misses: bracketed paste, focus reporting, synchronized output, all mouse tracking, autowrap, keypad, charset (line-drawing → ASCII), scroll region, colors, cursor shape
6. Drains any stale queued input (mouse/focus byte floods) until empty

Requirements

bash (the input-flush loop uses read -t/-n, which POSIX sh/dash lack). The #!/usr/bin/env bash shebang handles this on Linux and macOS alike.