Add keybinding for clearing scrollback

[Nopik]

idea / problem

When terminal is full of garbage and I want to start analyzing some text, in my iTerm2 I press cmd-K to clear screen and scrollback, and basically 'start from fresh'. This does not work in herdr. There is ctrl-l, but it only clears screen, not scrollback.

requested change

Add keybinding to clear screen+scrollback

why you want this

As above

[etern47]

I wanted this too so I've implemented it, a clear_pane keybinding action that works like iTerm2's cmd+K

• it clears the visible screen and scrollback of the focused pane and keeps the line you're currently typing on (prompt + pending input, including soft-wrapped lines) and moves it to the top
• sends nothing to the shell / process. it manipulates terminal state directly, so it also works on panes that are busy printing logs
• skips panes on the alternate screen (vim, less, etc.)
• made it unset by default, bindable like any other action e.g. clear_pane = "prefix+shift+k"

under the hood it's a pane.clear API method with a herdr pane clear <pane_id> CLI wrapper, and the keybind dispatches through that.

Branch: https://github.com/etern47/herdr/tree/feat/clear-pane
Diff: master...etern47:herdr:feat/clear-pane

Screen.Recording.2026-07-07.at.8.15.18.am.mov

[brunorodmoreira]

+1. Muscle memory from iTerm2 and Ghostty makes me hit cmd+K in herdr all the time, and nothing happens. I dug into why. Ghostty's clear_screen is a deliberate no-op while an alt-screen app is running, same as with tmux, see ghostty-org/ghostty#9692. So only herdr can clear its own panes. The good news is that herdr already enables the kitty keyboard protocol, which means the cmd+K press falls through and reaches herdr as super+k. A bindable "clear pane screen and scrollback" action would cover it, skipping panes whose app is on its own alternate screen, the same rule Ghostty applies.

I built this locally and it works. Branch here if useful: https://github.com/brunorodmoreira/herdr/tree/clear-pane

[onlymejosh]

This is awesome - Have you opened a PR for this?

[brunorodmoreira]

Actually not 🙁, this statement here discouraged me. So I don't know the proper way to go ahead with this suggestion.

@ogulcancelik wdt?

[onlymejosh]

Ah - I missed that part. I get the reasoning but it is tricky to navigate now. I think this is a much needed addition I’m regularly pressing cmd+k and having to change panes to force a redraw, which is very annoying. There’s also no work around for clearing I don’t believe currently.

…

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[mishaled]

+1. No way to do this today in 0.9.0 (macOS, Homebrew).

• There is no clear action in [keys]. I checked the full action list in the binary — the closest are edit_scrollback and copy_mode.
• ctrl+l sends \E[H\E[2J (terminfo cap), so scrollback stays. /usr/bin/clear adds \E[3J and does clear it — but both need a shell in the pane. In an agent pane (Claude Code, Codex) the TUI owns ctrl+l and there is no prompt to type clear into.
• [[keys.command]] cannot help: pane run / send-text / send-keys all write to the PTY, so the escape lands as literal input, not as a control sequence. Same wall as [idea] Command to clear pane screen and scrollback without restarting the process #3300.
• The binary already has a ClearScrollback emulator action. It is only reachable from pane output, and there is no pane.clear in the socket API.

Would love for it to be exposed as a bindable clear_pane action plus herdr pane clear <pane_id>, acting on herdr's own buffer without touching the PTY.

@etern47 is your clear_pane work up as a PR? Happy to test it on macOS with agent panes.

[ogulcancelik]

added via #4383