[dev-ns8]

Scrolling behavior is one of my biggest gripes with tmux. I've not done enough digging on terminal emulators and multiplexers to know why this is.

Is this an inherent limitation of multiplexers or does it stem from a choice made by tmux?

[axiolite]

It's a choice. tmux uses the "alternate screen" capability, the same way editors like "vi" do, which (according to man tmux): "preserves the contents of the window when an interactive application starts and restores it on exit, so that any output visible before the application starts reappears unchanged after it exits."

To change that behavior, put the following in your tmux.conf:

    set -g terminal-overrides '*:smcup@:rmcup@'
    set -g status off