Delight your terminal with paclear, a whimsical take on the 'clear' command accompanied by a PAC-MAN animation. It's a fun way to clear your terminal screen and enjoy a bit of nostalgia at the same time.
Criticism from a place of love (This is such a great, whimsical idea!):
In the videos on the page, the Pac-Man starts completely on-screen, obliterating the content in one go, and proceeds to the right, and disappears as soon as it touches the right edge of the window.
The effect would be so much better if the Pac-Man started 'off-the-left', and came in column-by-column, not obliterating any content until it was covered by its body, and proceeded rightward until it was completely off screen.
To put it another way, this looks like the content is cleared, a Pac-Man is teleported in on the left, moves right, and is teleported out. It would be better if the terminal appeared sort of like a window that the Pac-Man passes through, obliterating the content only when it’s underneath the Pac-Man.
Well, unless you speak fluent Japanese to the point you can read lawyer-speak in it, you'll need to translate that, but it is surprisingly sensible. Worth a glance if you're into IP issues. I'm impressed.
For bash, if `$HISTCONTROL` is `ignoreboth` or `ignorespace`, commands with a leading space are not added to the history, so you could try that as a workaround.
> Sometimes junior devs get confused seeing the clear command at work, thinking I opened a new terminal window.
I don't tend to type `clear`; I just press Ctrl-L, which clears the screen if typed at the start of a prompt. Quicker, and doesn't leave `clear` commands in your history.
Hello everyone, I'm the creator of paclear.
Thank you for all the comments and stars. Your feedback here is invaluable, and I plan to incorporate it into future updates.
I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to Bandai Namco for publishing the official fan-made policy of Pac-Man, which made this project possible. Thank you all for your support!
The animations made me laugh. I love silly little projects like this. It's the kind of thing I would simlink to clear and forget about. Then one frustrating day of coding, I'd clear the screen and see the chomping go by and lift my mood just a bit.
In Alacritty, ctrl-l clears the screen but does not clear the scrollback buffer. Clear also clears the scrollback buffer. This is useful for running programs with lots of output containing escape codes that may get mangled by less; just run the program and press shift-home to scroll to the top of the buffer.
I've been typing "clear" for so long that it would take longer for me to think to override my muscle memory and use ctrl-l instead, and the time saved isn't enough to bother retraining myself on this.
Also, ctrl-l isn't universal, but "clear" very nearly is.
I was thinking of operating systems I use aside from the Unices or Windows, such as VMS, z/OS, etc. But now that I consider it, I don't know for a fact that Ctrl-l doesn't work with standard terminal programs in other OSes. I just assumed it generally won't. So, grain of salt and all that.
In the videos on the page, the Pac-Man starts completely on-screen, obliterating the content in one go, and proceeds to the right, and disappears as soon as it touches the right edge of the window.
The effect would be so much better if the Pac-Man started 'off-the-left', and came in column-by-column, not obliterating any content until it was covered by its body, and proceeded rightward until it was completely off screen.
To put it another way, this looks like the content is cleared, a Pac-Man is teleported in on the left, moves right, and is teleported out. It would be better if the terminal appeared sort of like a window that the Pac-Man passes through, obliterating the content only when it’s underneath the Pac-Man.
I hope I’m making sense!