making space in the terminal: different strategies

When a terminal window gets busy, sometimes, it’s nice to make a little breathing so that it’s easier to see what’s going on.

There are a few different ways to do this:

1. Add new lines
2. Use the built-in “Clear to start” or “Clear to previous mark
3. Run clear

Adding New Lines

This is the easiest solution. When the terminal window gets full, just press enter or CTRL (⌃) + C (exiting the process, even if there is not one running), until the previous print out is above the fold.

Run Built-In Clear Commands

There are many useful keyboard shortcuts for the terminal on MacOS (which work in iTerm2 as well).

In this case, two that are particularly useful are:

1. “Clear to start” (CMD (⌘) + K)
2. “Clear to previous mark” (CMD (⌘) + L)

For a long time, “Clear to start” has been my go to. It is like opening a brand new terminal but without losing any of the context.

Run Clear

When I watch other people work - whether they’re colleagues or instructors for a course I’m taking - I am always surprised by the prevalent use of the clear utilit.

In the UNIX tradition, it does one thing. From the manual page:

NAME clear - clear the terminal screen

SYNOPSIS clear

DESCRIPTION clear clears your screen if this is possible. It looks in the environ- ment for the terminal type and then in the terminfo database to figure out how to clear the screen.

   clear ignores any command-line parameters that may be present.

SEE ALSO tput(1), terminfo(5)

   This describes ncurses version 5.7 (patch 20081102).

Putting that in practice:

clear

New Preference For Clear

I decided to try clear and found I actually prefer it. Why? Because while it does provide the same clean terminal feel as “Clear to start”, it does so without clearing history.

As a result, when running clear, I can “scroll up” to see the previous logs.

Not losing history in the event that I may need it seems like a benefit worth paying with three extra characters.