> A recent example that boiled my blood is that the new Windows Terminal emulates the incorrect "Clear-Host" behaviour of ancient Linux terminals.
Hi! I run the team who made this decision, and I flatly reject the characterization that these changes were made by "recent hires" who are "copying Linuxisms into Windows bug-for-bug."
The discussion you're referring to spans multiple threads, so I'm not certain the exact one you're referring to. I can, however, give some of my input:
1. We worked pretty hard to make sure that PowerShell's Clear-Host and CMD's "CLS", which operate on the entire scrollback buffer in the traditional console, are properly translated into a full buffer clear over SSH/in Terminal/etc.
2. Terminal fully supports CSI 3 J, a non-standard extension to the Erase in Display control sequence that clears the scrollback buffer. The handful of tools I am using that support "clear" actually seem to emit both "clear viewport" and "clear buffer." If you're using a version of clear that has been configured to NOT emit ED 3 (clear scrollback history) by default, that's simply not my team's fault. I've heard that you can use "clear -x" to affect your desired behavior.
It turns out that there being no true standard here plays to our advantage: we can support requests for all manner of clear, and trust that an application can be made to do the right thing. If you're using an application that can't be made to do the right thing per at least thirty other terminal emulators' designs--spanning more than just Windows and Linux, mind you--I apologize.
If you'd like to reopen that discussion here instead of on GitHub, you are more than welcome to.
> Hi! I run the team who made this decision, and I flatly reject the characterization that these changes were made by "recent hires" who are "copying Linuxisms into Windows bug-for-bug."
Hi! I see Microsoft people on "docs.microsoft.com" use forward slashes now in examples that only work on Windows. So, there's that.
If I open the latest version of Windows Terminal, running PowerShell Core (not some Bash thing with some VTY codes or whatever) and I run "Clear-Host", I can scroll back and see content that wasn't cleared.
THIS BREAKS MY WORKFLOW. I used Clear-Host so I can run a command with pages out of output, and then I know that scrolling back will go back to that output only, not something that happened three hours ago but superficially looks identical.
If I do this with PowerShell 5.1 with the old Terminal, it works as expected. It works like it has for the last 40 years of DOS and Windows history.
PS: It's broken even worse in Visual Studio Code.
You guys outright abandoned your user base to pander to Linux users. On Windows. Linux users on Windows. That enormous, huge majority of your paying user base that is apparently more important that the hundreds of millions of people like me.
So yeah, you should reopen the issue and rethink your priorities...
It feels like that Blizzard developer Wyatt Cheng that got on stage and asked the PC gamer crowd: "Do you guys not have phones?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QRgpjfarY
The Windows Terminal guys are similar. "Do you have any plans at all to make this work for users of Windows?" "No."
Hi! I run the team who made this decision, and I flatly reject the characterization that these changes were made by "recent hires" who are "copying Linuxisms into Windows bug-for-bug."
The discussion you're referring to spans multiple threads, so I'm not certain the exact one you're referring to. I can, however, give some of my input:
1. We worked pretty hard to make sure that PowerShell's Clear-Host and CMD's "CLS", which operate on the entire scrollback buffer in the traditional console, are properly translated into a full buffer clear over SSH/in Terminal/etc.
2. Terminal fully supports CSI 3 J, a non-standard extension to the Erase in Display control sequence that clears the scrollback buffer. The handful of tools I am using that support "clear" actually seem to emit both "clear viewport" and "clear buffer." If you're using a version of clear that has been configured to NOT emit ED 3 (clear scrollback history) by default, that's simply not my team's fault. I've heard that you can use "clear -x" to affect your desired behavior.
It turns out that there being no true standard here plays to our advantage: we can support requests for all manner of clear, and trust that an application can be made to do the right thing. If you're using an application that can't be made to do the right thing per at least thirty other terminal emulators' designs--spanning more than just Windows and Linux, mind you--I apologize.
If you'd like to reopen that discussion here instead of on GitHub, you are more than welcome to.