Clear the Screen should do Exactly That

[VictorXLR]

• VSCode Version: Latest
• OS Version: Windows 10

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open VSCODE terminal CMD
2. Run a few Commands,
3. Type CLS

it should clear the screen and not put everything on a new line.

Might not be a serious issue but it bugs the hell out of me :)

Reproduces without extensions: Yes

[Tyriar]

This is being discussed upstream xtermjs/xterm.js#106

[ghiscoding]

Not sure if this is exactly the same behavior as what the issue was opened with but here's my observations.

Doing a cls does clear the screen but it's annoying to see the previous history coming back after running another command. For example, if I run a Unit Test and do a cls, I don't expect to see previous tests coming back after a cls but they do and this makes the terminal a little hard to follow. I'm running version 1.18.0-insiders which has the new terminal rendering engine.

[Spown]

eyep, have to destroy terminal before every test call. upstream or not this is ridiculous.

[suadev]

same here!

I have to create a new instance of terminal after every 'dotnet test' command!

[TheKojukinator]

Just ran in to this issue myself. Every time I F5 my PowerShell script, all the previous output that used to be in the terminal returns, along with the new output. If I perform cls/Clear-Host it goes away until I F5 again, and the old content returns with new output appended. And so on...

Here's my about window:
Version 1.22.2
Commit 3aeede7
Date 2018-04-12T16:38:45.278Z
Shell 1.7.12
Renderer 58.0.3029.110
Node 7.9.0
Architecture x64

[ogarvey]

In case it helps anyone else, while it doesn't solve the issue properly, ctrl+k with the terminal focused should do the same job as cls would normally.

[juancrl]

Any update ?
The console cannot provide wrong information !

[TheKojukinator]

xtermjs/xterm.js#106 got closed on June 1st, as the problem appears to be with https://github.com/rprichard/winpty.
#45693 lists all the winpty issues affecting vscode, and this one is among them.

I checked the winpty repo for open issues mentioning "cls" or "clear" but nothing stands out as related to this. I don't have enough expertise to open an issue with winpty and provide details that would be relevant, but maybe that's what needs to be done to move forward on this?

[Tyriar]

@TheKojukinator #45693 will be looking at an alternative to winpty.

[Tyriar]

This is likely related to winpty, tracking in #45693