Automatically clearing the screen on recompile in sbt

Question

I am using sbt with the sbt-revolver plugin and I want to clear the terminal screen (^L) when the project is recompiled (~ re-start). How can this be done?

Answer 1

You could define new command clear, which would use jline to clear the screen. Sbt is using jline internally so you shouldn't have to include any extra dependency.

build.sbt

def clearConsoleCommand = Command.command("clear") { state =>
  val cr = new jline.console.ConsoleReader()
  cr.clearScreen
  state
}

val root = project.in(file(".")).settings(commands += clearConsoleCommand)

Now you could run your compile like this ~;clear;compile. This will trigger clear the console followed by compile on each file change (assuming this is what you want).