How to clear the entire terminal (PowerShell)

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tl;dr

  • The question is about clearing both the screen and the scrollback buffer in the integrated terminal of Visual Studio Code, and the next section addresses that.

    • Update: While the commands built into the shells used to not clear the scrollback buffer too, as of Visual Studio Code v1.86 they do – see the last section for details.

  • To clear both the screen and the scrollback buffer in a regular console / terminal / in Windows Terminal:

    • On Windows and Linux: Use Clear-Host (whose aliases are cls and on Windows only, also clear; on Linux and macOS, clear refers to the external /usr/bin/clear utility, which has the same effect on Linux only).
    • On macOS: Execute Write-Host -NoNewLine "`e[2J`e[3J`e[H" from PowerShell, or printf '\033[2J\033[3J\033[H' from POSIX-compatible shells; in PowerShell 7.4+ on macOS 14+ (Sonoma or higher), [Console]::Clear() works now too.

To also clear the scrollback buffer, not just the visible portion of the terminal in Visual Studio Code’s integrated terminal, use one of the following methods:

  • Caveat: The following methods do not play nicely with PowerShell (both editions, up to at least v7.4.1; other shells seem to be fine): Even though clearing works fine, PowerShell is then confused about the cursor position when the next command is typed – this problem has been reported in GitHub issue #19479.

  • Use the command palette:

    • Press Ctrl+Shift+P and type tclear to match the Terminal: Clear command and press Enter

  • Use the integrated terminal’s context menu:

    • Right-click in the terminal and select Clear from the context menu.
    • On Windows, you may have to enable the integrated terminal’s context menu first, given that by default right-clicking pastes text from the clipboard:
      Open the settings (Ctrl+,) and change setting terminal.integrated.rightClickBehavior to either default or selectWord (the latter selects the word under the cursor before showing the context menu).

  • Use a keyboard shortcut from inside the integrated terminal (current as of v1.71 of VSCode):

    • On macOS, a shortcut exists by default: Cmd+K

    • On Linux and Windows, you can define an analogous custom key binding, Ctrl+K, as follows, by directly editing file keybindings.json (command Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON) from the command palette), and placing the following object inside the existing array ([ ... ]):

{
    "key": "ctrl+k",
    "command": "workbench.action.terminal.clear",
    "when": "terminalFocus && terminalHasBeenCreated || terminalFocus && terminalProcessSupported"
}

Using a command you can invoke from a shell in the integrated terminal:

Note: A truly cross-platform solution would require executing the VSCode-internal workbench.action.terminal.clear command directly from a shell, but I don’t know how to do that / if it is possible at all – do tell us if you know.

  • Linux (at least as observed on Ubuntu):

    • Use the standard clear utility (/usr/bin/clear), which also clears the scrollback buffer.

    • From PowerShell, you may also use Clear-Host (which calls /usr/bin/clear) or its built-in alias, cls.

    • [Console]::Clear() clears the scrollback buffer too, but only in PowerShell 7.4+ (.NET 8+).

  • macOS:

    • As of at least macOS Sonoma (14+) /usr/bin/clear now does appear to clear the scrollback buffer too in VS Code (though, curiously, still not in regular terminals), and therefore also PowerShell’s Clear-Host, which calls it behind the scenes.

    • On macOS Sonoma (14+) and PowerShell 7.4+ / .NET 8 [Console]::Clear() now works too.

    • Alternatively, on older versions, print the following ANSI control sequence: '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H' (\e represents the ESC char. (0x1b, 27); e.g., from bash: printf '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H'; from PowerShell: Write-Host -NoNewLine "`e[2J`e[3J`e[H"

    • You can easily wrap this call in a shell script for use from any shell: create a file named, say, cclear, in a directory listed in your system’s PATH variable, then make it executable with chmod a+x; then save the following content to it:

      #!/bin/bash

# Clears the terminal screen *and the scrollback buffer*.
# (Needed only on macOS, where /usr/bin/clear doesn't do the latter.)

printf '\e[2J\e[3J\e[H'

  • Windows:

    • As of Visual Studio Code v1.86.1, the standard commands – cls in cmd.exe and Clear-Host / cls in PowerShell – do also clear the scrollback buffer (they didn’t use to), but doing so comes with bugs in the integrated terminal:

      • In cmd.exe, and in PowerShell (Core) (observed in v7.4.1) when run inside the PIC (the PowerShell Integrated Console, a special-purpose shell for developing PowerShell code via the PowerShell extension), one line is unexpectedly retained in the scrollback buffer.

      • Additionally, in PowerShell (Core) (observed in v7.4.1), also when running as a regular shell, the shell-integration decorations aren’t reliably cleared (the marks to the left and right (scrollbar) of the terminal).

      • By contrast, Windows PowerShell (at least when running as a stand-alone shell) does not seem to have these problems.

    • As a workaround for the current bugs, you can override Clear-Host as follows (using the same ANSI/VT escape sequences that work on macOS and Linux too; place it in your $PROFILE file):

      function Clear-Host { 
  Write-Host -NoNewLine "$([char]27)[2J$([char]27)[3J$([char]27)[H" 
}

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