vim doesn't clear screen inside of screen
 

I have a question about vim and scrollback.
So when i exit vim, I'm used to vim usually erasing all evidence of it having ever run, and returning to the commandline with the previous command right above it, like this:
[eddie@db1 ~]$ vim
[eddie@db1 ~]$

ie, you can see that I ran vim, but you can't see any of the vim windows or anything, because when I exited, vim erased all of itself, so now all you see is the command I used to get into it.

HOWEVER, now that I'm using screen, and running vim within that, vim doesn't erase itself when I exit, so it muddies up my terminal scrollback with a bunch of old vim windows etc.

Any ideas how i can get it to work how I'm used to within screen, that is to say, when I exit vim, vim will clear up all characters that it placed into the terminal?

Sounds like a term/termcap issue, what distribution are you using and what term is your client reporting in screen vs out of screen.

I'm using putty from windows and remotely logging into the linux box over the internet.
Terminal-type string is xterm

[eddie@db1 beyond]$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.18-128.el5 (mockbuild@builder10.centos.org) (gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-44)) #1 SMP Wed Jan 21 10:41:14 EST 2009

clearing screen inside screen
 

The behavior is configurable:

man screen:

altscreen on|off

If set to on, "alternate screen" support is enabled in virtual termi-
nals, just like in xterm. Initial setting is `off'.

Worked perfectly!

Many thanks.