TIL that clear also nukes scrollback

I often use clear to, well, clear my terminal screen. It’s in my muscle memory. The other day, after typing clear in tmux, I wanted to take another look at some output from a couple of minutes ago. I was surprised to find out that tmux scrollback buffer was gone.

Lo and behold, the manual page does state that clear also clears terminal scrollback buffer. It will look up information about your current TERM in terminfo database to figure out how to perform screen clearing, and it will clear the scrollback buffer as well, but only for terminals with extended (E3) capability. Simply emitting a sequence such as printf '\033[3J' will clear the scrollback buffer in terminals with this capability.

It appears that I have used screen-256color as TERM on my personal laptop, whereas on this machine it was set to xterm-256color, the latter having E3 capability.

In order to avoid scrollback clearing, either use screen-256color for tmux, or simply use clear -x to clear only visible content of the screen. Also, it seems that clear on OS X does not have this behaviour, as it is a part of ncurses distribution that predates this patch.