How to clear the entire terminal (PowerShell) - powershell

Question

I had an issue. Using the clear or cls command in powershell clears only the visible portion of the terminal,I would like to know how to clear the entire terminal?
I use VSCode by the way.

Answer 1

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:
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 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 or its built-in alias, cls.
By contrast, [Console]::Clear() does NOT clear the scrollback buffer and clear just one screenful.
macOS:
Unfortunately, neither /usr/bin/clear nor PowerShell's Clear-Host (cls) nor .NET's [Console]::Clear() clear the scrollback buffer - they all clear just one screenful.
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: "`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:
NO solution that I'm aware of: cmd.exe's internal cls command and PowerShell's internal Clear-Host command clear only one screenful in the integrated terminal (not also the scrollback buffer - even though they also do the latter in a regular console window and in Windows Terminal).
Unfortunately, the escape sequence that works on macOS ("`e[2J`e[3J`e[H" or, for Windows PowerShell, "$([char]27)[2J$([char]27)[3J$([char]27)[H") is not effective: on Windows it just clears one screenful.
(By contrast, all of these methods do also clear the scrollback buffer in regular console windows and Windows Terminal.)

Answer 2

right click on the powershell button,
then select clear,
when you are at the command window, type "clear" command, to clear the terminal window.