console space eaten up by file contents

Question

see the example below to understand my problem ; consider my console prompt look like this

user@server $ ls
"I opened a file temp"
user@server $ vi temp

"temp will open in the same window, when I close temp, I dont come back to "

user@server $ ls
user@server $ vi temp
user@server $

instead I come back to something like this

user@server $ ls
user@server $ vi temp
"temp file content"
"temp file content"
"temp file content"
user@server $

Its eating up my visible screen space, and I may end up losing some important output because of this file content.

Answer 1

There is a feature in terminals called "alternate screen". It lets a program use a different virtual "screen" and restore the previous one when it exits.

You need a terminal emulator that supports this feature. Gnome-terminal, urxvt, and xterm all do. I've never seen it disabled by default, but if it is just disabled, you may be able to enable it using Xresources. If you have xterm or urxvt, then in your ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults file, add the following:

For xterm:

XTerm*titeInhibit: false

For urxvt:

urxvt*secondaryScreen: true

Some gui terminals may have an options panel with a check-box for enabling the alternate screen.

More resources:

http://blogmal.42.org/tidbits/titeinhibit.story

http://shallowsky.com/linux/noaltscreen.html

Answer 2

Try using screen (or byobu, which is an extended version of screen you might like better). It needs no special terminal support beyond the standard features.

You launch it like this:

screen

or

byobu

Easy!

Then it opens with a new shell. Once inside, you can open a second shell at the same time by pressing Ctrl-Ac, and then you can switch between then with Ctrl-A1 and Ctrl-A2. You can repeat this to open even more at once.

You can also open vim (or anything else) in another view like this (from within one of the existing screen views):

screen vim blah

As an added bonus you can close the terminal (not exit the shell), log out, and when you next log in again (assuming the machine hasn't been rebooted) you can reconnect to your old session, and everything will still be as you left it:

screen -r

The downside is that you can't use the terminal's own scroll feature - you have to use screen's scroll feature: hit Ctrl-AEsc, then you can page up and down, and return to normal mode with Esc.

Answer 3

Use the full blown vim version, not the vim-tiny one. Both vim and vim-tiny are conveniently called from the command line using vi as it is a drop in replacement for the original editor. Many distributions come standard with vim-tiny.