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GNU Screen 5.0 Released

savannah.gnu.org

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Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#41

Post by throw0101d »

Izkata wrote: post #30
throw0101d wrote: post #6

To anyone to perhaps who has used both a lot: * Are there particular pros and cons to using screen or tmux ? (I'm generally on macOS for work, but never really go into using iTerm2, so that integration isn't a big thing for me personally.) Edit: I mean why use one over the other. I generally use something on the destination host I'm SSHing to in case the network goes sideways.

One advantage of knowing screen, it's likely already installed on whatever remote machine you're connecting to.

IIRC: RHEL9 no longer has screen (EPEL-only), and only has tmux.

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#42

Post by freedomben »

mdaniel wrote: post #8
freedomben wrote: post #2

Looks like a few QoL improvements and bug fixes. Nothing disruptive that would normally come with a major release version. Looks like you can set a password on it now, which is cool (though I personally like having linux perms govern access to my screen/tmux). Multiinput sounds interesting as well, though in the past that was a feature I thought I'd love to have, but once I had I never use. I'm glad to see Screen is…

> Ctrl+a from my cold dead fingers As someone who uses `set -o emacs` I cannot possibly imagine pressing C-a C-a to go to the beginning of the line Also, as an iTerm2 user: the integration with tmux control mode (tmux -CC) is just amazing for the way I use tmux

C-a C-a definitely annoyed me at first, but I got used to it and now I don't mind it at all.

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#44

Post by josephcsible »

freedomben wrote: post #2

Looks like a few QoL improvements and bug fixes. Nothing disruptive that would normally come with a major release version. Looks like you can set a password on it now, which is cool (though I personally like having linux perms govern access to my screen/tmux). Multiinput sounds interesting as well, though in the past that was a feature I thought I'd love to have, but once I had I never use. I'm glad to see Screen is…

> Looks like you can set a password on it now, which is cool

I wish they didn't support that. There's not actually a security boundary there since you can't just reattach to another user's session anyway, and a lot of security people make stupid rules like "if something supports a password, you always have to use one".

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#45

Post by mm0lqf »

boltzmann-brain wrote: post #37
aeonik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you switch to tmux? It seems to me that screen is more ubiquitous, and has more features. Having a modem is a pretty handy thing built into it.

> Having a modem is a pretty handy thing built into it. in what way?

when I worked in the embedded software industry long ago, I spent lots and lots of time connecting over serial ports to dev boards, using software like Minicom. Being able to do that in screen itself would be neat. Tmux does it.

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#46

Post by elashri »

I started using tmux because 12 years ago all people said it is better than screen. I didn't use screen much myself. Sometime I read a comparison and it seems screen is good for my usage. But I didn't want to leave tmux because I wrote a wrapper around it to have more human readable syntax and it just works. And I don't want to work on modifying it for screen.

I don't use most of tmux or screen functionalities anyway. Mostly it is a way of avoiding multiple ssh connections and to run things when I close the laptop.

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#47

Post by riddley »

aeonik wrote: post #21
freedomben wrote: post #2

Looks like a few QoL improvements and bug fixes. Nothing disruptive that would normally come with a major release version. Looks like you can set a password on it now, which is cool (though I personally like having linux perms govern access to my screen/tmux). Multiinput sounds interesting as well, though in the past that was a feature I thought I'd love to have, but once I had I never use. I'm glad to see Screen is…

Why did you switch to tmux? It seems to me that screen is more ubiquitous, and has more features. Having a modem is a pretty handy thing built into it.

I was a very long time screen user and tried tmux early on in its existence. It was slow and different so I bailed back to screen. Last year I tried tmux again and have switched to it full time.

One of the things I like most about it is how easy it is to extend. In the role I was in last year, I'd have several long-lasting SSH sessions to various hosts. With a very simple bash script I was able to create a prompt in tmux that I could trigger to ask me where I wanted to ssh to. If I already had a connection to that host, it would switch me to that window, if not, it would create a new one and ssh to the host.

I wanted to do that in screen for years, but it just didn't have the features to facilitate it. On top of that I was able to easily re-map all of the keybindings to be just like screen for my muscle memory.

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#48

Post by lloeki »

freedomben wrote: post #2

Looks like a few QoL improvements and bug fixes. Nothing disruptive that would normally come with a major release version. Looks like you can set a password on it now, which is cool (though I personally like having linux perms govern access to my screen/tmux). Multiinput sounds interesting as well, though in the past that was a feature I thought I'd love to have, but once I had I never use. I'm glad to see Screen is…

The one thing I hate about tmux is that it leaks env vars across instances:

    # terminal 1, start a fresh first tmux session, which magically spawns a daemon with the same env
    $ env FOO=bar tmux
    
    # terminal 2, start another tmux session, which reuses the daemon's env
    $ tmux
    $ echo $FOO
    bar
Try the same with `screen` and you're safe.

This is especially annoying when you're using, say, direnv, and project-specific env vars appear magically on an unrelated subsequent session because your first `tmux` turned out to be from a direnv-enabled directory, which polluted the global environment, which in turn pollutes every subsequent session environment as long as a session (not necessarily the original one) is alive.

Replace FOO with SOME_SECRET/ACCESS_KEY/TOKEN and you can actually accidentally expose/leak stuff or point to the wrong thing.

The unattended workaround is to have the tmux daemon spawn at login via `start-server` + enable some tmux settings like `exit-empty` plus some I can't recall regarding environment handling, but nobody does that.

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#49

Post by zelphirkalt »

xedrac wrote: post #17
mickeyp wrote: post #12

Screen, tmux, et al. are great. But here's another way of approaching the same problem: Emacs can serve as a superlative terminal multiplexer if you're willing to give it a shot or if you're already an Emacs user, but do not want to use Emacs's TRAMP (remote editing) functionality: 1. Emacs can run as a server, so you can run it on your remote servers and connect to it with `emacsclient' via SSH. This has the added a…

Obigatory Emacs video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

Somehow I knew what video that would be, before clicking the link.

Re: GNU Screen 5.0 Released

#50

Post by ffsm8 »

elashri wrote: post #46

I started using tmux because 12 years ago all people said it is better than screen. I didn't use screen much myself. Sometime I read a comparison and it seems screen is good for my usage. But I didn't want to leave tmux because I wrote a wrapper around it to have more human readable syntax and it just works. And I don't want to work on modifying it for screen. I don't use most of tmux or screen functionalities anyway…

Almost the same for me. I just switched to byobu in early 2010s instead of creating a wrapper myself. Haven't felt the need to check anything new since.
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