How to refresh/reset/redraw/repaint the screen?

[sudormrfbin]

Discussed in #4349

^{Originally posted by GlassGruber October 18, 2022}
I'm not really sure what is the correct term, so I've listed some that came to mind regarding this minor display issue.

I'm a new user and testing things around I've faced some glitches like characters of previous lines not cleared when moving cursor while testing different color themes.
I think however that this is more related to my terminal rather than an hx direct issue.

So I thought something like using shortcut ctrl+L could "refresh" current screen and remove all displayed inconsistencies, but nothing happened and looking for commands like :redraw :clear came up to nothing (BTW the fuzzy cmd : search is very smooth and the tooltip tui pretty nice, hat to you!🎩)

I've checked the keymap docs page but haven't found anything about this.

Hope it's not a RTFM case, thank you!

[sudormrfbin]

There's a clear function that is defined on Compositor.terminal:

helix/helix-tui/src/terminal.rs

Lines 214 to 219 in 7f75458

	pub fn clear(&mut self) -> io::Result<()> {
	self.backend.clear()?;
	// Reset the back buffer to make sure the next update will redraw everything.
	self.buffers[1 - self.current].reset();
	Ok(())
	}

It should be possible to add a redraw command/keybind that calls this method by adding a Job, something like this:

fn redraw(cx: &mut Context) {
    let callback = Box::pin(async move {
        let call: job::Callback = Box::new(|_editor, compositor| {
            // expose a wrapper `clear` method that calls
            // compositor.terminal.clear()
            compositor.clear(); 
        });
        Ok(call)
    });
    cx.jobs.callback(callback);
}

[Omnikar]

Doesn't previewing a theme using :theme rerender the whole screen?

[jrvidal]

Looking through the new architecture, it's not totally obvious to me how to approach this. What about a needs_clear flag in Compositor that we can set on a command, and that instructs Application::render to clear the terminal screen?

[gabydd]

closed by #6949