[konsole] [Bug 365893] Clear scrollback and reset leaves the terminal screen completely blank.

[Egmont Koblinger via KDE Bugzilla]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365893

--- Comment #3 from Egmont Koblinger <egmont at gmail.com> ---
> I don't quite understand what you mean by "app running inside the terminal".

In this case I'm afraid you lack the very basic knowledge about what happens
when you open a terminal emulator. There are at least two applications that
start and co-operate, one is the terminal emulator itself, and the other one is
the shell running inside (there could easily be more applications nested
running inside). The shell is the command line interpreter which instructs the
terminal emulator to display the prompt, and the terminal emulator obeys this
instruction and does display the prompt.

Then you ask the terminal emulator to clear its contents, and again, it obeys
your instruction, and clears the screen. So everything's fine.

There is no way the terminal emulator could potentially know which parts of the
screen to retain, and there is no way the terminal emulator could notify the
app running inside (e.g. your shell) that it cleared the screen.

Also, there could be other apps running inside, maybe a text editor (e.g. vim),
a file manager (e.g. mc), a non-interactive tool (e.g. gcc), or a whole lot
more. What should the clear action do then?

The only sane way I can see to "fix" this issue would be to remove this menu
entry, I really don't think it's needed. For the time being, you could just
personally not use it.

> This problem did not occur in KDE4. [...] I currently do not use KDE

I don't use KDE either, I'm a developer of another terminal emulator (that does
the same on clear) lurking around in other forums. I have absolutely no clue
what KDE4 did and I won't install that to find it out.

> Leaving the screen with no prompt definitely gives the user the impression that the OS is broken & full of bugs.

In my opinion, complaining about this gives the impression that you don't
understand how the world of terminal emulation works. Unlike browsers, popular
homepages, mobile phone UIs etc. where it's pretty much expected that you
should be able to use them without prior knowledge, terminal emulators are
mostly for power users and developers. I think it's a reasonable expectation
that you first try to understand how and why it behaves, before coming up with
expectations.

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