How Do You Clear The IRB Console?
RubyIrbRuby Problem Overview
How do you clear the IRB console screen?
Ruby Solutions
Solution 1 - Ruby
On Mac OS X or Linux you can use Ctrl + L to clear the IRB screen.
Solution 2 - Ruby
Throw this inside %userprofile%\.irbrc and you're good
def cls
system('cls')
end
Solution 3 - Ruby
On *nix boxes
`clear`
on Windows
system 'cls' # works
`cls` # does not work
on OSX
system 'clear' # works
`clear` # does not work
Solution 4 - Ruby
Command + K in macOS works great.
Solution 5 - Ruby
On Ubuntu 11.10 system clear will mostly clear the irb window. You get a return => True value printed.
A big mess of ugly text
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :007 > system 'clear'
what ya get:
=> true
ruby-1.9.2-p290 :007 >
Solution 6 - Ruby
Just discovered this today: in Pry (an IRB alternative), a line of input that begins with a . will be forwarded to the command shell. Which means on Mac & Linux, we can use:
. clear
And, on Windows (Command Prompt and Windows Terminal), we can use:
. cls
Source: pry.github.io
Solution 7 - Ruby
system 'clear'
Should work for rails 4.0 as well
Solution 8 - Ruby
In order to clear the screen just do:
puts "\e[H\e[2J"
P.S. This was tested on Linux.
Solution 9 - Ruby
On Linux Mint 17 also you can use Ctrl + Shift + L
or
Ctrl + L to clear the IRB screen.
Solution 10 - Ruby
puts `clear`
Clears the screen and then returns => nil Tested on Mac OSX 10.6 Terminal and iTerm2.
Solution 11 - Ruby
Method:
def clear_screen if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /win32|win64|\.NET|windows|cygwin|mingw32/i system('cls') else system('clear') end end
Or in IRB you can use system('clear')
Solution 12 - Ruby
In windows, using Rails 4,
system('cls')
worked for me
Solution 13 - Ruby
Tons of good answers here, but I often remote into a linux box with Mintty from windows. Kudos to the above about using .irbrc, but came up with this:
def cls
puts "\ec\e[3J"
end
def clear
puts "\e[H\e[2Js"
end
This gives you the options for both the *nix 'clear' behavior and the Windows 'cls' behavior, which I often find more useful if I really want to nuke the buffer rather than just scrolling it out of view.
P.S. a similar variant also works in .bashrc:
alias cls='echo -e "\ec\e[3J"'
If anyone could find a way to actually map that to a keystroke, I'd love to hear it. I would really like to have something akin to cmd-k on osx that would work in Mintty.
Solution 14 - Ruby
Add the following method to ~/.irbrc:
def clear
conf.return_format = ""
system('clear')
end
Cntrl-L or Cntrl-K work in regular console but I'm using tmux and those mess the screen up inside the tmux window.
The conf.return_format = "" takes the nil off the return value.
Solution 15 - Ruby
Windows users simply try,
system 'cls'
OR
system('cls')
Looks like this in the IRB window,
irb(main):333:0> system 'cls'
irb(main):007:0> system('cls')
Did the trick for me in ruby 1.9.3. However the following commands did not work and returned => nil,
system('clear')
system 'clear'
system `cls` #using the backquotes below ESC Key in windows
Solution 16 - Ruby
I've used this for executable files:
def clear
system("cls") || system("clear") || puts("\e[H\e[2J")
end
clear
Solution 17 - Ruby
system 'cls'
Works for me in Windows, with Ruby 2.2.0 and rails 4.0
Solution 18 - Ruby
I came here looking for a way to reset the tty with irb, since it wasn't printing newlines or showing what I typed somehow, only some output.
1.9.3-p125 :151 > system 'reset'
finally did the trick for me!
Solution 19 - Ruby
For windows users:
If you create a bat file name c.bat whose contents are:
@echo off
cls
Then, in IRB, you can say:
system('c')
to clear the console. I just thought I would share because I thought that was pretty cool. Essentially anything in the path is accessible.
Solution 20 - Ruby
->(a,b,c){x=a.method(b);a.send(c,b){send c,b,&x;false};print"\e[2J\e[H \e[D"}[irb_context,:echo?,:define_singleton_method]
This will fully clear your IRB screen, with no extra empty lines and “=> nil” stuff. Tested on Linux/Windows.
This one-liner could be expanded as:
lambda {
original_echo = irb_context.method(:echo?)
irb_context.send(:define_singleton_method, :echo?) {
send :define_singleton_method, :echo?, &original_echo
false
}
print "\e[2J\e[H \e[D"
}.call
This uses lots of tricks.
Firstly, irb will call echo? to check if the result should be printed. I saved the method, then redefined with a method which restores the defination but returns false so irb will not echo the result.
Secondly, I printed some ANSI control chars. \e[2J will clean the screen and \e[H will move the cursor to the upper left position of the screen. \e[D will print a space and then move back the cursor while this is a workaround for something strange on Windows.
Finally this is kind of not practical at all. Just smile ;)
Solution 21 - Ruby
The backtick operator captures the output of the command and returns it
s = `cls`
puts s
would work better, I guess.