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Scroll view up (OSC 720)
ESC ] 720 BELOSC 720 scrolls the visible terminal view up by N lines into the scrollback buffer, as if the user pressed Shift+PageUp. The sequence is
ESC ] 720 BEL (some forms accept a count parameter). The companion OSC 721 scrolls back down toward the live region. Both are rxvt-unicode-only extensions, intended for scripts that wanted to drive the scrollback view from inside the terminal. Modern terminals do not expose scrollback navigation over escape sequences — the scrollback is considered a user-interface concept owned by the emulator, not the application — so these sequences are silently consumed everywhere except urxvt.How this is testedautomated
Populate scrollback, send
Populate scrollback, send
OSC 720 BEL, and verify the visible viewport moves up into scrollback.The same probe runs against headless backends (via Termless) and real terminal apps (via a daemon launched in each terminal). This lets us distinguish parser correctness from rendering correctness.
Analysis2026-05-17
Supported by all 8 tested terminals — universal adoption. Part of the Unicode baseline.
Supported by 10 of 14 backends (71%)
Terminal Applications
| Terminal | Version | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| iTerm2 | 3.6.9 | ✓ yes | |
| Ghostty | 1.3.1 | ✓ yes | |
| VS Code | ✓ yes | ||
| Warp | ✓ yes | ||
| Kitty | 0.46.2 | ✓ yes | |
| Cursor | ✓ yes | ||
| Terminal.app | ✓ yes |