Improve documentation to point Windows users to how they can set up basic commands

[PinkSerenity]

What happened, and what did you expect to happen?

When trying to use the clear command, I am faced with the following exception:
Exception: exec: "clear": executable file not found in %PATH%
Of course, since this is Windows, there is no real clear executable file (at least as far as I know). I have no idea how other shells are doing it, my idea was aliasing clear to cmd /c cls. But I don't know whether it is the right approach.

Considering that this is part of standard shell usage and other shells (like Nushell) have a working clear command as well, I will file it as a bug, but it might as well be a feature request for a out-of-the-box solution on Windows.

Output of "elvish -version"

0.21.0+official

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• I agree to follow Elvish's Code of Conduct.

[burdiyan]

I bumped into this issue because I tried to do ctrl+l to clear the terminal and I saw Unbound key: Ctrl-L which was quite unfortunate, because I have this shortcut in the muscle memory for so many years, and I'm constantly clearing my terminal with it. I know I can type clear, but I'm not used to it. And turns out that apparently clear also wouldn't work on Windows, which is also a bit sad.

@xiaq Is there some weird inherent complexity with being able to support ctrl+l to clear the terminal in a cross-platform way? I wouldn't be surprised knowing how cursed the world of terminal emulators is :)

[PinkSerenity]

You can easily set custom key bindings, that's not the issue. Also, the readline-binding module does what you want.

[ejrichards]

The command edit:clear clears the screen, no need to call cmd, you can alias it to clear:

fn clear { edit:clear }

If you want to also clear the scrollback, which edit:clear doesn't do:

fn clear { print "\e[H\e[2J\e[3J" }

[PinkSerenity]

The command edit:clear clears the screen, no need to call cmd, you can alias it to clear:

fn clear { edit:clear }

That is perfect. Thank you very much. Do you also know how to copy a file if cp causes the same exception? Or cat? Are all of these modules?

[ejrichards]

I'm personally using https://github.com/uutils/coreutils for cp, mkdir, etc. and https://github.com/sharkdp/bat for cat, but you could make aliases to the os: functions for some of the file operations.

[PinkSerenity]

I'm personally using https://github.com/uutils/coreutils for cp, mkdir, etc. and https://github.com/sharkdp/bat for cat, but you could make aliases to the os: functions for some of the file operations.

So just to clearify, you aliased the functions to coreutils.exe [function]? Because I'm gonna do that as well then. Thank you for your help.

I still leave this open, but I will change the title since I think the documentation might profit from some kind of "Windows Quick-start" that will help setting normal shell commands up.

[ejrichards]

coreutils can be a single binary that you symlink to with the names of the utilities, so I have a ~\.config\elvish\bin with symlinks to the utilities I want to use.