journalctl: how to prevent text from truncating in terminal

From the journalctl manpage:

   The output is paged through less by default, and long lines are
   "truncated" to screen width. The hidden part can be viewed by using the
   left-arrow and right-arrow keys. Paging can be disabled; see the
   --no-pager option and the "Environment" section below.

If you don't want to constantly be using the left and right arrow keys, simply pipe it directly to less:

$ journalctl -xn | less

This will wrap lines that are too long for your terminal (the default behavior of less, which journalctl overrides).

Or, of course, if you don't mind possibly having to use your terminal's scrollback, you could use no pager at all:

$ journalctl -xn --no-pager

I also do:

journalctl -xn | less

But you can also set the SYSTEMD_LESS environment variable:

SYSTEMD_LESS=FRXMK journalctl -xn
# Or even
# SYSTEMD_LESS="" journalctl -xn
# The environment variable needs to be there, but can be the empty string

I got that from: [systemd-devel] [PATCH] pager: wrap long lines by default

Set it in your .bashrc and be done with it! :-)

That systemd needs to setup less specially and doesn't just honor the less defaults and the LESS environment seems a little arrogant to me, but hey, this works...

If the program already uses less (if not, pipe the output to it), you can enable/disable line wrapping by typing -S (in less), This works for other less options as well.