This is just a dumb little thing that I've wondered for years how it works and how I can change it. For example, opening a document with vim, or opening a man page, and then exiting out of it will sometimes (depending on the distro) clear the screen and leave your prompt at the very top... other times, it leaves the contents of whatever you had open on-screen and your prompt is at the bottom.

I prefer the latter, so I hope someone has the answer to this elusive mystery.

To acheive the first you just issue a 'clear', i tend to like to issue a 'reset' also for my own personal use scripts.

The later i don't believe is as easy as a simple command, but it is behavior that can be performed via c. In retrospect I'm surprised there's not some kind of save and restore terminal state commands for bash to perform that functionality.

Edit: if memory serves me this is actually handled by the terminal and thus requires an escape code to be sent, however the exact code would likely depend on your terminal and I'm unaware of any program that does a variety of them for various terminals.