From a Linux terminal under a GUI such as KDE/Gnome, using the two utilities combined, found on most distributions, *multitail*, which is like a `tail` unix utility, only more powerful!

    adb logcat # want to see the logcat on the screen

Using Ctrl+S to suspend, then Ctrl+Q to resume the display, and simply mouse scroll the terminal to back-track seeing the logcat output.

The other way is this...

    adb logcat > my_logcat.txt 2>&1 & 
    multitail my_logcat.txt

The first line above creates a background process by using the `&` at the end of the command, redirecting any errors to `/dev/null` hence `2>&1`.

As the process is forked into the background, using `multitail` can perform, scroll-back on the logcat.

As for Windows, its easier, what you can do is this, from the cmd window, `adb logcat > my_logcat.txt` and just let it run, now, you can pause, resume the scrolling, in that cmd window, same keystrokes for Linux terminal, IIRC, now launch an editor and open the file 'my_logcat.txt' and there the results will show, had there not being a pause/resume in the cmd window, the file will get updated, such as using '[notepad2][1]' or similar, the in-built Windows's version of Notepad would do very little justice.


  [1]: http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html