NAME¶

erase, werase, clear, wclear, clrtobot, wclrtobot, clrtoeol, wclrtoeol - clear all or part of a curses window

SYNOPSIS¶

#include <ncursesw/curses.h>

int erase(void);
int werase(WINDOW *win);

int clear(void);
int wclear(WINDOW *win);

int clrtobot(void);
int wclrtobot(WINDOW *win);

int clrtoeol(void);
int wclrtoeol(WINDOW *win);

DESCRIPTION¶

RETURN VALUE¶

All routines return the integer OK on success and ERR on failure.

X/Open defines no error conditions. In this implementation,

• functions using a window pointer parameter return ERR if it is null
• wclrtoeol returns an error if the cursor position is about to wrap.

NOTES¶

Note that erase, werase, clear, wclear, clrtobot, and clrtoeol may be macros.

PORTABILITY¶

These functions are described in X/Open Curses, Issue 4.

The SVr4.0 manual says that these functions could return “or a non-negative integer if immedok is set”, referring to the return-value of wrefresh. In that implementation, wrefresh would return a count of the number of characters written to the terminal.

Some historic curses implementations had, as an undocumented feature, the ability to do the equivalent of clearok(..., 1) by saying touchwin(stdscr) or clear(stdscr). This will not work under ncurses.

This implementation, and others such as Solaris, sets the current position to 0,0 after erasing via werase and wclear. That fact is not documented in other implementations, and may not be true of implementations which were not derived from SVr4 source.

Not obvious from the description, most implementations clear the screen after wclear even for a subwindow or derived window. If you do not want to clear the screen during the next wrefresh, use werase instead.

SEE ALSO¶

ncurses(3NCURSES), outopts(3NCURSES), refresh(3NCURSES), curses_variables(3NCURSES)