Today, I discovered a menu item called "Show Alternate Screen" in Terminal.app. I am just curious about what it does. It seems to be sharing the same shell process (unlike tabs), since I see output from one screen on the other while a command is running (e.g. find .
) and the current directory is kept in sync.
What is this feature and how is it useful?
Best Answer
The alternate screen is a concept that goes way back.
From the
xterm
man page: