Smooth scrolling

Experimental

This depends on a terminal protocol that only exists in personal forks today. It may change or go away.

Terminals move content a whole character at a time, so panning a map jumps by a cell. As an experiment, mapterm can move the map by single pixels on terminals that support an experimental smooth-scroll protocol. Today that is only Ghostty Smooth, a personal fork of Ghostty (see its SMOOTH.md). The herdr fork relays it from herdr panes.

Turning it on

It’s off unless you set an environment variable:

Setting	Effect
MAPTERM_SMOOTH=shift	Dragging follows the pointer pixel by pixel; scrolling still zooms
MAPTERM_SMOOTH=1	Two-finger up/down pans the map smoothly instead of zooming

MAPTERM_SMOOTH=shift mapterm

With either set, s toggles smooth scrolling while mapterm runs. Terminals without the protocol ignore it and behave as usual.

See it

The video at the top of the home page was made this way: mapterm in Ghostty Smooth with MAPTERM_SMOOTH=shift, the map dragged pixel by pixel along the Potomac from Key Bridge to the Tidal Basin, and recorded from the window. In other terminals the same drag moves the map a whole cell at a time.