On Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 05:05:49PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote:
With Zsh, there is the "redisplay" zle command, it does exactly that:
redraw the prompt and command without clearing the screen.
I do not know if readline, used by bash, has the same feature available.
Interesting. I've never looked into this stuff before.
There is a "redraw-current-line" action in readline, but bash doesn't
bind any keys to it by default, neither in emacs nor vi mode.
But before I could even test that, I came across this section in the
man page:
clear-screen (C-l)
Clear the screen, then redraw the current line, leaving the cur‐
rent line at the top of the screen. With an argument, refresh
the current line without clearing the screen.
That bit about "With an argument" is totally new information for me.
I'm a vi mode user, so I tried it as indicated: I typed some random
stuff, and then I pressed ESC 0 Ctrl-L. It didn't work (it cleared the
whole screen). So maybe an argument of 0 doesn't count... oh, right.
That's because 0 is a movement command ("jump to first column"). Next I
tried with a non-zero argument: ESC 1 Ctrl-L. That worked. It redrew
the current prompt and command line, without clearing the screen.
I also tested in emacs mode, but I'm not as proficient there. Again,
ESC 1 Ctrl-L seems to work. And so does Alt-1 Ctrl-L, in my terminal
(but Alt-1 may not work in all terminals, so be warned).
For extra fun: Alt-0 Ctrl-L also works in emacs mode. Apparently emacs
can handle an argument of 0, because 0 isn't a movement command in
emacs the way it is in vi.
So, there's that. And that will do what the OP wants, albeit not
"automatically" the way they seemed to want. They actually have to
press the keys.
I'll let others play around with binding redraw-current-line to some
unused key combo. I'm betting it does the same thing, once bound.