Can one of the educators on the list explain why this is such a commonly required feature? I literally never feel the need to clear my screen -- but I've seen this requested quite a few times in various forms, often as a bug report "IDLE does not support CLS". I presume that this is a common thing in other programming environments for beginners -- even C++ (given that it was mentioned). Maybe it's a thing that command-line users on Windows are told to do frequently? What am I missing that students want to do frequently? Is it a holdover from the DOS age?

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 11:25 AM Mike Miller <python-ideas@mgmiller.net> wrote:

On 2020-10-13 06:19, Stestagg wrote:
> For example, the pypi `console` library provides a method: `console.sc.reset()`
> that behaves similarly to `CLS` on windows and also appears to be fairly
> reliable cross-platform.


Yes, there is more to it than appears at first glance.  There is resetting the
terminal, clearing the currently visible screen, and/or the scrollback buffer as
well.

The legacy Windows console has another limitation in that I don't believe it has
a single API call to clear the whole thing.  One must iterate over the whole
buffer and write spaces to each cell, or some similar craziness.  That's why
even folks writing C++ just punt and do a system("cls") instead.

With the mentioned lib console, the example above prints the ANSI codes to do a
terminal reset, and while that works widely these days, it should not be the
first choice.  It would be better to use the cross-platform wrapper functions in
the console.utils module, either:

     # A DOS-like reset, clears screen and scrollback, also aliased to cls()
     reset_terminal()

     # A Unix-like clear, configurable via param, and aliased to clear()
     clear_screen()

-Mike
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