Watch mode to re-render the current screen instead of clearing the scrollback

[borekb]

🚀 Feature Proposal

Watch mode currently prints test outputs over and over again, filling up scrollback, which is probably why a drastic measure was taken back in 2016 and the scrollback has been cleared ever since, see #1861. Clearing a scrollback means that I cannot scroll to previous output in my terminal, so it's a small "data loss".

iTerm2 beta (I'm on 3.4.0beta10) started disallowing this and shows this warning:

The current iTerms stable, and I guess many other terminals, just accept the control character and clear the scrollback.

The proposal is to implement the watch mode in a similar way that vim / less / man and others that temporarily redraw their UI but don't leave traces in terminal history (sorry if I'm using imprecise terms). That means that the watch mode would have no big reason to clear the scrollback, the iTerm warning would go away and previous terminal data would be preserved.

[pfernandez]

I'd call this a bug report rather than a feature request. Clearing the entire scroll history is a problem.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open for 1 year with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 14 days.

[github-actions]

This issue was closed because it has been stalled for 7 days with no activity. Please open a new issue if the issue is still relevant, linking to this one.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.
Please note this issue tracker is not a help forum. We recommend using StackOverflow or our discord channel for questions.