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Comment by jsherwani | Hacker News Reader

Until this post, I hadn’t thought of GNU Screen at all. It isn’t a tool that I’ve used in more than 5 years, and is not top of mind for me at all.

Also, no one in our private beta ever raised this concern.

Screen just switched to public beta today, and the idea is for us to get feedback on issues we may not have seen before. This is a great example of such an issue! And as I’ve said elsewhere, if this continues to be an issue, we will change it. It’s not in our interest to have customer confusion either.

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Why would it "stop" being an issue? GNU screen is not going anywhere. Maybe you'll stop hearing complaints once all initial grievances are aired and it's obvious that you don't care, but it will continue to cause confusion in the workplace.

Just today I was recommending (GNU) screen to a coworker to address transient outages with a remote connection. It would get pretty annoying to constantly clarify which screen I mean, as they are both used in the same circumstances.

Probably 99% of their users will either have never heard of gnu screen, or don’t care. It’s such a common word that it’s silly to think one thing “owns” it any more than the next.

That's a little bizzare, but ok. Gnu screen has low latency, works well on Linux and bsds, works well with vim and emacs, works well for pair programming? I'm not sure how good the mouse support/sharing is - but I think selection and cursor is shared fine?

Don't get me wrong, I've got lots of colleagues who use various other editors, like vs code - but... This isn't just a case of pre-existing software with a similar name - combined with ssh, gnu screen is arguably superior for pair bugfixing in production, for example (multiple ppl can ssh into the same server).

I get that this is "like gnu screen, but for xorg/Wayland - and without any support for resuming remote sessions" - just sounds like an odd pitch - as you say you especially want to target Linux support...

Thanks for the reply. What kind of market analysis did you do before building this, err, again (and better)?

You support Linux (well!), I’m surprised your beta testers didn’t say anything. That’s an interesting problem —I wonder what other blind spots like this can be avoided.

The main market analysis was asking users what their pain points were and solving them. Screenhero didn’t have robust drawing, for instance.

Admittedly, we only had a handful of Linux users in our private beta, but still, none of them mentioned the GNU tool.

Heh. I use gnu screen daily. Saw this and immediate downloaded it (I missed screenhero so much) and got coworkers to use it with me, and never considered the name collision. I'm surprised by the number of comments about it.

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