[FIXED] How to clear the entire terminal (PowerShell)

Issue

I had an issue. Using the clear or cls command in powershell clears only the visible portion of the terminal,I would like to know how to clear the entire terminal?

I use VSCode by the way.

Solution

To also clear the scrollback buffer, not just the visible portion of the terminal in Visual Studio Code's integrated terminal, use one of the following methods:

• Use the command palette:

  • Press Ctrl+Shift+P and type tclear to match the Terminal: Clear command and press Enter

• Use the integrated terminal's context menu:

  • Right-click in the terminal and select Clear from the context menu.
  • On Windows, you may have to enable the integrated terminal's context menu first, given that by default right-clicking pastes text from the clipboard:
    Open the settings (Ctrl+,) and change setting terminal.integrated.rightClickBehavior to either default or selectWord (the latter selects the word under the cursor before showing the context menu).

• Use a keyboard shortcut from inside the integrated terminal (current as of v1.71 of VSCode):

  • On macOS, a shortcut exists by default: Cmd+K
  • On Linux and Windows, you can define an analogous custom key binding, Ctrl+K, as follows, by directly editing file keybindings.json (command Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON) from the command palette), and placing the following object inside the existing array ([ ... ]):

{
    "key": "ctrl+k",
    "command": "workbench.action.terminal.clear",
    "when": "terminalFocus && terminalHasBeenCreated || terminalFocus && terminalProcessSupported"
}

---

Using a command you can invoke from a shell in the integrated terminal:

Note: A truly cross-platform solution would require executing the VSCode-internal workbench.action.terminal.clear command from a shell, but I don't know how to do that / if it is possible at all - do tell us if you know.

• Linux (at least as observed on Ubuntu):

  • Use the standard clear utility (/usr/bin/clear), which also clears the scrollback buffer.

  • From PowerShell, you may also use Clear-Host or its built-in alias, cls.

    • By contrast, [Console]::Clear() does NOT clear the scrollback buffer and clear just one screenful.

• macOS:

  • Unfortunately, neither /usr/bin/clear nor PowerShell's Clear-Host (cls) nor .NET's [Console]::Clear() clear the scrollback buffer - they all clear just one screenful.

  • Print the following ANSI control sequence: '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H' (\e represents the ESC char. (0x1b, 27); e.g., from bash: printf '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H'; from PowerShell: "`e[2J`e[3J`e[H"

  • You can easily wrap this call in a shell script for use from any shell: create a file named, say, cclear, in a directory listed in your system's PATH variable, then make it executable with chmod a+x; then save the following content to it:

    #!/bin/bash
    
    # Clears the terminal screen *and the scrollback buffer*.
    # (Needed only on macOS, where /usr/bin/clear doesn't do the latter.)
    
    printf '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H'
    

• Windows:

  • NO solution that I'm aware of: cmd.exe's internal cls command and PowerShell's internal Clear-Host command clear only one screenful in the integrated terminal (not also the scrollback buffer - even though they also do the latter in a regular console window and in Windows Terminal).

  • Unfortunately, the escape sequence that works on macOS ("`e[2J`e[3J`e[H" or, for Windows PowerShell, "$([char]27)[2J$([char]27)[3J$([char]27)[H") is not effective: on Windows it just clears one screenful.

  • (By contrast, all of these methods do also clear the scrollback buffer in regular console windows and Windows Terminal.)

Answered By - mklement0

Answer Checked By - David Goodson (PHPFixing Volunteer)