Using the “alternate screen” in a bash script

Question

The alternate screen is used by many \"user-interactive\" terminal applications like vim, htop, screen, alsamixer, less, ... It is like a different buffer of the te

Answer 1

smcup/rmcup are used, but only for the side effect: the escape sequence which switches between normal/alternate screens is usually embedded in those terminfo capabilities -- not always.

Some background is in the xterm faq Why doesn't the screen clear when running vi?