Gnu screen with split screen | Hacker News Reader

Gnu screen with split screen

scie.nti.st

25 pointsgtani10 comments

You can split the screen at every level of the display stack: tiling window manager, dvtm, screen, emacs, now it's a big problem to choose which level to split.

"Pound for pound," screen might just be the most useful GNU utility there is. (That is, for such a small program, it has a ton of uses and makes so many other programs more useful!)

I haven't used screen for about a year or two. I can't stand the GNU/EMACS keybinding. Naturally I chose dwm+mrxvt

The only thing I miss is attach/detach ... Does anyone know any alternative to Screen?

Thx!

I couldn't see what the news here was until I actually clicked the link. For a second I feared the obvious, ancient "look at what this tool can do!!!" links which digg and reddit are notorious for was hitting Hacker news.

Cool stuff. None the less, I think the submitter should have made the headline say "vertical split screen", since split screen really isn't news at all.

I prefer the horizontal split. For reading say.. IRC, or websites, it's far more useful than a vertical split.

A vertical split is useful if you have, for example, a full-screen terminal window and a large monitor. It's not generally useful to have a terminal window 200+ characters wide.

A tiling window manager (e.g. dwm, xmonad) is often a better solution here, but it's good to have the option in screen itself.

ratpoison is pretty much gnu screen for x11

Right, and it's had vsplit for quite a while, too. Stumpwm (http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/) is another WM along the same lines, though I haven't tried it. It's written in Common Lisp, BTW.

I used ratpoison for a while, but I came to prefer tiling window managers (e.g. dwm, xmonad, wmii, larswm) -- They generally have the same strengths as ratpoison but fewer drawbacks. You still have to manage all of the actual windows yourself in ratpoison, and it's considerably more awkward to use some programs (e.g. the gimp) that assume a typical WM. Most of the tiling WMs I've used have a "floating" bit to accomodate clients that shouldn't be tiled. Each has its own design quirks that make them hard to generalize about, but as a group they tend to be very keyboard-friendly.

I was under the impression that ratpoison was considered a tiling WM.

Actually, you're right, I wasn't specific enough. Automatically tiling window managers, sorry. Ratpoison breaks windows up into non-overlapping tiles, but it doesn't (by default) automatically manage their placement anymore than screen does. Opening up a new terminal (or whatever) covers the previously active one.

The WMs I'm talking about automatically place windows into various layouts, such as "master window on one side, other windows stacked vertically on the other side", current window full-screen, current window floating with mouse-drag-based move and resize, etc.

In dwm or wmii you can tag windows arbitrarily, and each tag works as a separate workspace. Whenever you switch tags or add/remove a window, the others are repositioned according to the current layout rule. In practice, I often do things like run emacs on its own tag, but also on a tag shared with a pdf or something I'm referencing. Workspace #8 is emacs, #4 is split emacs+pdf+screen, etc. You just specify which windows to group together and it does the rest, usually needing little intervention.

You can add this sort of fast grouping behavior to ratpoison via scripting (and the scripting interface for it is pretty good), but it doesn't try to do this by default. Its priority is on avoiding the mouse, rather than avoiding manual window placement in general. The latter indirectly leads to an interface with less mouse use anyway, though, since you seldom spend time clicking to focus on, move, or resize windows except with programs that are too awkward to use in tiles.

This has less and less to do with screen, though.

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