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Comment by mblakele | Hacker News Reader

I use "screen" a lot, but I wish it had a better name. It helps if you search for "gnu-screen", but not much.

Here's a tip that has saved me once or twice. If you start a long-running process, but forgot to use screen or nohup, bash lets you 'disown -h' its jobspec.

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One day I took the time to work this out for my .screenrc, and it's served me well since:

  # Set up my status line at the bottom of every frame
  caption always "%{gb}  %{ck}%m-%d %C %{gb}  %{gb}%?%-Lw%?%{ck}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{gb}%?%+Lw%?"

All of the %{gb} things are color codes. It looks like this: http://shenani.gen.nz/~scott/screen-statusbar.png

Binding ! @ # etc. to select 10, 11, 12, ... is handy, too.

There are more .screenrcs (including my own) in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425890

That's good. Here's what I'm using:

  hardstatus alwayslastline
  hardstatus string "%n: %H (%h) %t"

For bindings, I find '10 '11 etc to be efficient enough. But I also make heavy use of :number to reorder my windows so that I know which one is which. There's also shift-A, to give them meaningful labels in the ctrl-A " list.

The biggest problem with screen is that it breaks ordinary virtual terminal scrollback, which is something that I can live with, but…

Does this not work for you?

From http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~jnweiger/screen-faq....

  Q: My xterm scrollbar does not work with screen.
  A: The problem is that xterm will not allow scrolling if the
     alternate text buffer is selected. The standard
     definitions of the termcap initialize capabilities ti and
     te switch to and from the alternate text buffer. (The 
     scrollbar also does not work when you start e.g. 'vi'). 
     You can tell screen not to use these initialisations by 
     adding the line termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@ to your 
     ~/.screenrc file.

No, it becomes chaotic and unusable when I have more screen windows and switch among them :-)

I would not complain, if I knew such an easy way to make it work, really. :-)

"Ctrl-a [" will put you enter the copy buffer mode and let you scroll up

Sure, but that's only a poor substitute. I can't just press shift + pg [up,down] or drag scrollbar in the terminal emulator or use mouse wheel.

Yeah I know, Shift+PG[up, down] not being usable is kinda a bummer but as a bonus you can use / to search the scrollback buffer plus all the vi movement keys are available.

I might be slow about screen, but how is it different from running several tabs in Terminal on Mac OS X for example ?

I can see it being useful in ssh through : you can have it emulate tabs through a single ssh connection.

screen is persistent over dropped connections. Lets say you are doing some long running operations on a remote server and your connection drops. With screen you can log back in and run 'screen -r' to resume the session.

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