Built-in Terminal and External Terminal

By default, tracexec uses an internal & built-in terminal when performing a scoped trace of a user-specified command. The built-in terminal offers a convenient way to interact with the traced processes inside tracexec. However, the built-in terminal supports limited terminal features and may not work well for some use cases. As a workaround, you can also let tracexec trace an external terminal emulator.

Built-in terminal

tracexec tui allocates a pseudo-terminal (PTY) for the command by default. The command’s standard input, output, and error streams are connected to the Terminal pane, while the TUI itself is drawn on the surrounding terminal.

tracexec tui -- bash

Press Ctrl+S to switch between the Terminal and Events panes. If a terminal program needs to receive a literal Ctrl+S, focus the Events pane and press Alt+S.

The PTY has a 1,000-line scrollback buffer by default. Change it for one run with --scrollback-lines:

tracexec tui --scrollback-lines 10000 -- bash

TUI without a terminal pane

Use --no-tty when the command needs no interaction:

tracexec tui --no-tty -- make -j8

In this mode the command’s stdin, stdout, and stderr are redirected to /dev/null; --no-tty does not inherit the outer terminal. Use the log frontend if you want the command to keep the current terminal while tracexec prints events alongside it.

External Terminal Emulators

To use tracexec with an external terminal emulator, make tracexec trace the external terminal directly.

For example,

tracexec tui --no-tty -- konsole

launches an external konsole terminal emulator in a separate window.

You can also specify the command to run for the external terminal emulator. But the way to do it depends on which terminal emulator you are using.

# For konsole
tracexec tui --no-tty -- konsole -e "bash"
# For kitty
tracexec tui --no-tty -- kitty bash