Assistant gave incorrect guidance: /clear said to leave terminal scrollback intact
Description
During a chat session, I asked whether /clear and /compact behave differently, specifically around being able to scroll up and see my prior messages. The assistant's response included this incorrect claim:
"/clear also leaves earlier messages scrollable in most terminals (it resets my context, not your terminal's scroll buffer) - it just cuts my memory of them... If your goal is 'I want to scroll up and see what I typed' → both usually let you do that; it's a terminal feature, not a context one."
In practice, running /clear did not leave my previous conversation scrollable/visible in the terminal — I was not able to scroll up and see the prior conversation afterward, contradicting the guidance given.
Expected behavior
/clear documentation/guidance should accurately reflect its effect on terminal display state, not just the model's context window. If /clear clears the terminal screen/scrollback in common terminal setups (e.g. iTerm2, Terminal.app), the assistant should not tell users they can rely on scrollback to recover prior conversation content.
Impact
This could lead users to run /clear believing they can still reference their prior conversation via scrollback, when in fact that content becomes inaccessible unless they resume the session transcript (e.g. via claude --resume or the underlying .jsonl session log).
Environment
- Platform: macOS (Darwin)
- Reported via Claude Code CLI session