Er, my comment was exaggerative? (edit: fixed typo)
I use reset all the time, it's not "last resort" by any means. It... clears the screen and scrollback buffer. If you're the kind of person who keeps 150 tabs open then I guess I can see why you wouldn't see the value in cleaning the screen up frequently, but clearing the terminal is a pretty frequent and useful operation for other folks.
[1] https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/keyassignment/Clea...
You could try echo -ne '\ec' or echo -ne '\033c'. Or this from bash/readline:
clear-display (M-C-l)
Clear the screen and, if possible, the terminal's scrollback buffer, then redraw the current line, leaving the current line at the top of the screen.
I actually do that a lot, when I'm done with a terminal window for now but want the scrollback to stay there. ctrl-L to send a pagebreak is what I usually do, or typing something aliased to `clear`.
Why wouldn't you use "clear" for that, or Ctrl+L? "reset" does a lot more, you use it when you've accidentally written a binary to your terminal and triggered a bunch of terminal modes.
I guess clear wouldn't clear the scroll buffer, is that the main reason?
Yes. See sibling replies.
On any non-libvte using terminal emulator, eg. xterm, you can use CTRL+L to clear the text area and ALT+CTRL+L to clear the text area and the scroll buffer.
No it wasn’t. But I also said exaggerative not aggressive.
> I use reset all the time, it's not "last resort" by any means. It clears the screen.
That’s what ‘clear’ is for.
Reset is intended to do more than just clear the screen. It’s intended to reset, as the name suggests, the entire terminal. The idea being it’s got itself into some kind of unknown state.
There are hot keys to clear your screen too, such as ctrl+L (works in most shells) plus your terminal emulator will likely have its own hot keys too. So fewer button presses and even quicker for you.
lmorg ~ % reset
lmorg ~ % reset
lmorg ~ % which reset
/usr/bin/reset
lmorg ~ %
function reset {
printf '\033c'
}
If your terminal emulator doesn’t even have that, I suggest switching to a better one.
I hope you realize you’re doing something really suboptimal here.
Edit: Saw your other comment and apparently you don’t even use reset(1), just your own function (which is still suboptimal like I said). WTF is with all the arguing then.