Watch someone backspace 40 characters instead of pressing CTRL+W, and you’ll understand why this list exists. A collection of shell tricks-grouped by what works everywhere and what’s Bash/Zsh-speci...
clear: clears the visible screen (sends the terminal’s “clear” sequence); usually fast and does not change terminal settings or fully reinitialize scrollback.
reset: fully reinitializes the terminal (sends init strings, resets modes/attributes, may reconfigure terminfo/baud, and clears); slower and used to recover from garbled output or broken state.
I asked this myself, too. AI response:
clear: clears the visible screen (sends the terminal’s “clear” sequence); usually fast and does not change terminal settings or fully reinitialize scrollback.
reset: fully reinitializes the terminal (sends init strings, resets modes/attributes, may reconfigure terminfo/baud, and clears); slower and used to recover from garbled output or broken state.