Can't I scroll in the terminal up? Terminal shows only 24 rows? The scrollbar on the right fills the entire vertical height of the window?

Question

Based on: Terminal output scrolling is gone (Headless 11.10 Server, Upgraded from 10.10)
and
https://superuser.com/questions/1331658/why-cant-i-scroll-in-the-terminal and my own dire situation right now.

What I did before the problem occurred?

I'm running this tor relay on a VPS, and I'm monitoring it using nyx tor monitor. I'm connecting to this VPS from my home based laptop, running Ubuntu 22.04, totally updated version.

For the first time I was trying the nohup command run against nyx tor monitor.
I just wanted nyx to survive terminal disconnect (from my local Ubuntu 22.04 laptop), and be able to close the laptop, turn it back on again, ssh into my tor and nyx running VPS and bring back nyx from the background, instead of turning it on after the VPS login.
I've run nohup nyx & and then my problems started. I've got the nohup output:

rafal@debian:~$ nohup nyx &
[1] 4532
rafal@debian:~$ nohup: ignoring input and appending output to 'nohup.out'

Why ignoring input??
I need to pass the nyx password. How am I to do this without the input or while input is ignored.
How am I supposed to check if nyx even launched without a password or not?? I've typed fg and now I can type the nyx password.
So I type the password and press Enter but nothing happens. I can see no input.

When I use jobs command, I get no output in return.

What's wrong?

1. Shift+PgUp writes 2~ on the command line instead of scrolling,
2. Ctrl+Shift+↑ writes A on the command line instead of scrolling,
3. Terminal on my home laptop shows only 24 rows, no matter what command I'll throw at it: history shows only 24 rows; cat -n /home/rafal/nohup.outor another command with a long output, px -aux shows only 24 rows;

1. The scrollbar on the right fills the entire vertical height of the window, indicating that there's nothing to scroll back to, while there are actually hundreds of lines above;
2. Turning the mouse wheel cycles the current line through my command history (same as UP key) instead of scrolling.
3. Of course I have 10 000 lines set in my gnome_terminal settings.

The question

Can you please tell me what exactly happened and what ignoring input means and why nohup ignores input by default??

rafal@debian:~$ nohup nyx &
[1] 4532
rafal@debian:~$ nohup: ignoring input and appending output to 'nohup.out'

I'm not using tmux.

In order to reinitialize the terminal, I've used reset to fix this. And it did fix terminal. Now after I use px -aux command I get full window height of lines like so:

Can you please explain to me, what am I doing wrong with this nohup nyx & command, that it's not working the way I expect it to??

Answer 1

This is just how nohup works. It is designed to run a process in the background, detached from your shell session and will not accept input and by default sends output to nohup.out.

However, you want to use it to run an interactive monitor, so nohup is the wrong tool for the job. Just use tmux or screen instead. Run nyx inide the tmux/screen session, and then you can close the terminal or your laptop, ssh back to your VPS, start tmux/screen again and you're right back where you started.

Answer 2

This is an addition to @terdon's answer, not a replacement for that.

Most terminal emulators have a "normal screen" and an "alternate screen". The latter one doesn't have a scrollback buffer, and is typically used by fullscreen apps. Apparently nyx is also such an application that switches to the alternate screen, that's why you cannot scroll.

Several terminals, including GNOME Terminal that you're using, send the keycodes of Shift+PageUp and friends (the scrolling keycombos) to the running application if you're on the alternate screen.