Terminal Reset (or Reset and Clear)

[markstinson]

When working in a terminal, occasionally something fouls up the session requiring a terminal Reset (or Reset and Clear). You can see an example of this menu item in gnome-terminal in the menubar Terminal -> Reset (or the item Reset and Clear).

There's no immediate way to issue a terminal Reset.

[ulidtko]

Patch which adds terminal reset feature

[ulidtko]

This patch implements the terminal reset feature.

It clears the scrollback buffer too; note that Ctrl+L (0x0C, FORM FEED) does clearing the screen too, but doesn't touch scrollback buffer. Also, ^L doesn't perform any resetting of the terminal.

attachment:add_terminal_reset_feature.patch

[ulidtko]

The patch contained garbage, thanks pingou for noticing that.

Attaching corrected and rebased patch.

[lincoln]

Hello there,

I've applied your patch to my tree and I found a small problem. After resetting the terminal, cursor is not being shown again. It's only shown after hitting the Return key. Is this happening with you?

Thanks.

[ulidtko]

Replying to lincoln:

I've applied your patch to my tree and I found a small problem. After resetting the terminal, cursor is not being shown again. It's only shown after hitting the Return key. Is this happening with you?

I'm testing it the following way.

1. Start Guake with this patch applied.
2. Issue in a terminal cat /dev/urandom, wait few seconds. The whole lot of garbage turns the terminal into a complete mess, and not only with the content, but also with occasionally happened control sequences. So after you stop it with Ctrl+C, typing anything also produces garbage. What a mess!
3. Use terminal reset. The scrollback buffer is cleared (you can't longer scroll up a bit and see the garbage), and terminal's state is reset to default. You can freely type in commands and receive normal feedback.
4. But, the shell has no way to know what just did happen. When resetting, terminal doesn't say anything to the program which is running there, so it can't know that it is the time to display the prompt.
5. And so finally, you should hit enter (that way issuing an empty command to the shell) to make it redraw the propmt.

We could send \n after performing terminal reset to force the shell redisplay the prompt, but that's not so easy because there might be running not a shell. There might be running some ncurses application like htop, and redrawing it should require sending or hitting Ctrl+L; there might be running vim - and still the same, return wouldn't help.

I'm not sure whether this feature may cause misuse or confusion to end users. At least one user requested it, and indeed it might be useful (for example, if you've got the garbage trouble but can't just close the tab because some work still lives there). Most of the users won't miss the feature a lot, imo.

[ulidtko]

When working in a terminal, occasionally something fouls up the session requiring a terminal Reset (or Reset and Clear). You can see an example of this menu item in gnome-terminal in the menubar Terminal -> Reset (or the item Reset and Clear).

There's no immediate way to issue a terminal Reset.

Besides the proposed patch, you *can* easily issue a terminal reset. Consider the reset utility from ncurses-bin package.

Accounting for availability of this flawlessly-working existing tool, I'm changing my mind that we don't need the feature in Guake. It will encumber the GUI and confuse inexperienced users.

[ulidtko]

Closing as wontfix for reasons explained in 7.

Those who need the feature can use the patch: 0001-add-terminal-reset-feature.patch .