On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 08:42:52PM -0700, Henry B. Hotz wrote:
> One of these days someone should figure out what the call is that X 
> uses to clear the whole screen and put it into the console driver so 
> text-only users can get "the right thing" (tm) done.

If you're using wscons, it's already there (even in 1.5.2) as a special
case.

DEC and ANSI X3.64 define
	^[[0J			clear screen from cursor to bottom right
	^[[J			same as ^[[0J
	^[[1J			clear screen from top left to cursor
	^[[2J			clear entire screen without moving cursor

	^[[H			move cursor to top left
	^[[r;cH			move cursor to row r, column c
				(e.g., ^[[5;13H -- I think rows start
				at 1 and columns at 0)
where ^[ is of course a literal escape.  There's a single 8-bit character
that will work instead of ^[[ but I haven't tried it.

In wscons ^[[2J clears the margin, while the other variants clear only
what's inside the margin.  I don't think termcap uses ^[[2J.  Incidentally,
wscons uses an ioctl to call soemthing else (I think it's rcons).
You can do other things with those ioctls -- I wrote a program to reset
the console colors after X messes them up.  wsconsctl is probably
a better place for that feature but I don't yet know how to expand it.

I found all this out by accident.  If the people who actually understand
wscons, rcons, etc. are on one of the mailing lists, I'd love to know.

-- Derek