[Python-ideas] Suggestion: Clear screen command for the REPL

[Paul Moore]

On 19 September 2016 at 13:10, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For this particular suggestion, though, I don't think that's the case.
> I think it's going to either be something that's accepted into the
> stdlib, or something that's rejected as too platform-specific or messy
> to standardise, and people should roll their own implementation.

Note, by the way, that in the form of a Python function, this
capability is already available in lots of places - colorama and click
include it, for a start. And even the stdlib has a version in the
curses module (albeit not available on Windows).

In the light of this, there seems little reason to water down this
proposal to "provide a clear screen function in the stdlib".

Taken in its original form of "add a command to the REPL to clear the
screen", the main issue is that the standard Python REPL simply
doesn't have a concept of "REPL commands", so there's nowhere really
to add that functionality without a relatively major overhaul. People
who want a richer REPL can look at other options like IDLE, or
IPython/Jupyter.

By the way - if you're on a system with readline support included with
Python, GNU readline apparently has a binding for clear-screen
(CTRL-L) so you may well have this functionality already (I don;'t use
Unix or readline, so I can't comment for sure).

So the proposal becomes limited to:

"""
Add a capability to the standard REPL to recognise and support
"commands" (as distinct from executable Python code) and provide a
"clear screen" command.
"""

This feature is only needed for users of the standard Python REPL, on
systems without readline support (i.e. Windows). I don't think that's
a significant enough benefit to warrant the change (even if we take
into account the potential opportunity for additional commands that
we'd get from adding command support to the REPL).

Paul