

A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen - ypk
http://linuxgazette.net/168/silva.html

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silentbicycle
Oddly, it doesn't mention tmux (<http://tmux.sourceforge.net/>), a newer
project that implements a similar terminal multiplexer. It was redesigned from
the ground up to more cleanly accommodate several features that have been
grafted onto the screen codebase. (It also has a BSD license, FWIW.)

After years, screen _still_ doesn't do vertical screen splits. It turned out
to be faster to just start from scratch.

~~~
tvon
Honestly, it would be odd for a tmux article to go without mentioning screen
but there is nothing odd about a screen article not mentioning tmux.

Speaking of which, I would like to see an article on tmux. Every now and then
a screen article pops up and a few people chime in with the vague advantages
of the BSD-licensed tmux, but I haven't seen any actual articles on tmux.

~~~
0wned
I use both. The only big difference? Besides the license? Screen uses 'Ctrl+A'
while tmux uses 'Ctrl+B' and screen -r (to reattach) is replaced by tmux
attach. That's it, for me at least. tmux seems to have a lot more features,
but I only use 10% of them.

~~~
silentbicycle
The biggest difference as far as I'm concerned is that it has vertical screen
splitting and xmonad / dwm-style automatic tiled layouts built in. I've also
looked into the codebases for both, and if I were working on new features, I
would far rather work on tmux's - it's much cleaner.

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mark_l_watson
That was a good writeup. I use screen so often, that I don't think much about
it, so this article was a good refresher.

A little off topic, but: I should spend about 5% of the time I devote to
exploring new programming languages to revisiting command shortcuts, etc. for
tools like Emacs, Idea, Rubymine, Eclipse, etc. A few days ago, I set up Emacs
for Rails development (involved learning a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts) -
now depending on what aspects of a project I am working on, I use either
Rubymine or Emacs (or TextMate if I have my MacBook booted to OS X)

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yan
I almost welcome the bimonthly screen article. I adore that program.

~~~
ivenkys
Same here , when i discovered it i couldn't understand how i had been working
without it for so long , suddenly i had 1 large terminal rather than "n"
different terminals.

The only thing i miss now is vertical splits , i think tmux solves that
problem as well.

~~~
rbanffy
"The only thing i miss now is vertical splits , i think tmux solves that
problem as well."

Ctrl-A+S or Ctrl-A+| ?

~~~
chewbranca
Just checked in ubuntu, those two commands will enable a horizontal split and
a vertical split, respectively. Thats great, screen has been amazingly useful
since the day I discovered it and have split windows working fully is just
icing on the cake.

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Hoff
The screen handling of vt100 emulation is badly broken, based on my recent
experience with it. A valid vt100 sequence was completely borking the terminal
session.

I've unfortunately not had the time to chase the bug down, and the boxes that
are generating the vt100 sequences are not where I can make them available to
the screen developers, either.

For those that are looking to achieve (better) vt100 compliance, there is a
reasonable test suite available at the <http://vt100.net/> site.

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psranga
Screen doesn't do vertical splits. That's a dealbreaker for me. Tmux does.

But tmux has another problem: very rapid scrolling in one window will make the
program completely unresponsive. In the same situation, screen doesn't have
this problem. I posted to the user list and the developer very quickly sent me
a patch, but it didn't fix the problem for me, although it worked for the
developer. Still working with the developer on this.

~~~
andrewscagnelli
There is a port of screen that includes vertical splits. Its nifty, but
requires the source to be patched:

<http://fungi.yuggoth.org/vsp4s/>

~~~
psranga
I read the README/blog post somewhere that vertical scrolling in one of the
subwindows is very slow. Hence I have not tried it out. Do you have any
experience with this?

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tfh
gnu screen is the reason i find terminal tabs obsolete.

~~~
mkelly
Agreed. screen is one of the single most useful tools I use.

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genieyclo
Ratpoison - <http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/>

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silentbicycle
Could you explain why this is relevant, rather than just linking to it?

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jacobolus
It's not really that relevant IMO, but maybe fans of screen want to extend the
screen approach to their whole computing experience? That's basically the goal
of ratpoison, which is a window manager based around the idea of tiling and
complete control via the keyboard, overall much simpler than KWin, etc.

~~~
silentbicycle
I knew why, but I've actually had much better luck with dwm
(<http://dwm.suckless.org/>) * . The automatically-tiled / multiple desktops
interface style works verrry well with a keyboard-centric usage style, but
also more gracefully accommodates programs that expect a more conventional UI
- ratpoison just seems to give up. (I used ratpoison exclusively for probably
three or four years.)

* Other people have also had good experience with XMonad (<http://xmonad.org/>) or awesome (<http://awesome.naquadah.org/>), though the former requires Haskell (I got burned by GHC's portability issues, and requiring GHC for a window manager strikes me as a bit silly), and awesome strikes me as a bit dodgy.

