It seems to me that the two options are orthogonal: allowing the user to add an arbitrary prefix is not a block for allowing the user to clear the screen or vice-versa. If anything, the arbitrary prefix seems the more general flag to me as it at least offers a way (however unportable) to perform a clear. So saying that if we do not allow the user to clear the screen then it is not fine to add arbitrary prefixes seems strange. On Thu, 28 Mar 2024 at 22:19, Dragan Simic <dsimic@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On 2024-03-28 21:43, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > Dragan Simic <dsimic@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > >> Of course, users could pick the right escape sequences for their > >> terminals, but as you already noted, the same configurations could > >> end up being used on different terminals. For example, even SSHing > >> into a machine using a different SSH client could lead to a mess. > > > > There is a separate discussion of conditional configuration based on > > environment variable settings, e.g. > > > > [includeIf "env:TERM:vt100"] > > path = ~/.git-config-bits/vt100 > > > > where the named file might have > > > > [prompt] prefix = "\033[H\033[J" > > > > so it is certainly doable. > > > > It is a different story if doing so is sensible, of course. > > Quite frankly, I think that would be like opening a can of worms. > In other words, if we end up implementing support for the "add -P" > prefix, allowing the users to do whatever they want with the prefixes > would surely be fine, but only if we implement "add -P" at the same > time, to already provide a reliable and simple way for clearing the > screen.
