A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen • Hacker News Board

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#11

Post by andrewscagnelli » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 3:50 PM UTC

psranga wrote: post #8

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 dev…

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

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

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#12

Post by psranga » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 3:56 PM UTC

andrewscagnelli wrote: post #11

psranga wrote: post #8

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 dev…

There is a port of screen that includes vertical splits. Its nifty, but requires the source to be patched: http://fungi.yuggoth.org/vsp4s/

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?

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#13

Post by mmc » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 4:13 PM UTC

psranga wrote: post #8

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 dev…

Screen has apparently had this in CVS since 2008:

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?15442

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#14

Post by kree10 » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 4:37 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

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.

Tmux's splitting is nice, but not quite as useful to me as screen's version. Screen will let me put any of my existing windows in a "pane" while tmux won't (or maybe it does and the docs aren't clear enough for me).

Another thing I found useful with screen was having multiple terminals attached to the same screen session, with each terminal viewing different windows. Tmux will let multiple terminals attach to a single session, but they all see the same thing (again, maybe I just haven't figured out how to do this yet).

Neither of these are deal breakers for me though. I switched from screen a couple months ago, and I've been a happy tmux user since.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#15

Post by tvon » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 4:51 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#16

Post by silentbicycle » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 5:36 PM UTC

tvon wrote: post #15

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

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.

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.

I'll put it in my queue of things to write about. Honestly, if I just gathered together content from my comments, I'd already be halfway there...

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#17

Post by w1ntermute » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 6:01 PM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

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.

Vertical splitting has been available in screen-git for over a year.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#18

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 6:29 PM UTC

ivenkys wrote: post #9

yan wrote: post #4

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

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.

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

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

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#19

Post by 0wned » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 7:41 PM UTC

tvon wrote: post #15

silentbicycle wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#20

Post by chewbranca » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 8:08 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #18

ivenkys wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The only thing i miss now is vertical splits , i think tmux solves that problem as well." Ctrl-A+S or Ctrl-A+| ?

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.