It's a common feature, but not formally standardized. ED 3 isn't actually in the [ECMA-048] spec. It was an xterm feature introduced in June 1999. Several ter

It's a common feature, but not formally standardized. ED 3 isn't actually in the [ECMA-048] spec. It was an xterm feature introduced in June 1999. Several terminal developers later adopted the feature. In April 2011, a Red Hat developer submitted a patch to the Linux kernel, modifying its console driver to do the same thing. So it's not a formal standard, but it's universal on Linux since 3.0 and many terminal emulators have adopted it. This history is covered in [clear(1)] from the ncurses project. [ECMA-48]: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-048.pdf http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST... [clear(1)]: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/clear.1.html#HISTORY http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/clear.1.html#HISTORY EDIT: Fix wording and formatting.