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A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

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Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#21

Post by graywh »

0wned wrote: post #19
tvon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An easily changed option is not a big difference.

From what I can tell, screen has better handling of colors. tmux seems to mess up the [90m; -like sequence for colors 8-15.

Also, I like the ability to highlight screen's current screen with colored parentheses.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#22

Post by silentbicycle »

0wned wrote: post #19
tvon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The biggest difference as far as I'm concerned is that it has vertical screen splitting and xmonad / dwm-style automatic tiled layouts built in. I've also looked into the codebases for both, and if I were working on new features, I would far rather work on tmux's - it's much cleaner.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#24

Post by psranga »

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/

Just tried out the screen from git as somebody pointed out above. Works as advertised. Pretty cool!

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#26

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

tfh wrote: post #2

gnu screen is the reason i find terminal tabs obsolete.

terminal tabs are still useful when you want to have multiple screen sessions on multiple physical machines. I run a screen session on my server with Irssi and admin stuff in one terminal tab, and another terminal session for my local machine. But honestly, Terminator [1] beats out tabs with it's useful split terminal layout. I can on-the-fly arbitrarily split, hide, maximize, or group panes, and then I can have multiple tabs worth of split terminals. It's quite fun. :)

[1] http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#27

Post by jacobolus »

silentbicycle wrote: post #25
genieyclo wrote: post #23

Ratpoison - http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

Could you explain why this is relevant, rather than just linking to it?

It's not really that relevant IMO, but maybe fans of screen want to extend the screen approach to their whole computing experience? That's basically the goal of ratpoison, which is a window manager based around the idea of tiling and complete control via the keyboard, overall much simpler than KWin, etc.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#28

Post by silentbicycle »

jacobolus wrote: post #27
silentbicycle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why this is relevant, rather than just linking to it?

It's not really that relevant IMO, but maybe fans of screen want to extend the screen approach to their whole computing experience? That's basically the goal of ratpoison, which is a window manager based around the idea of tiling and complete control via the keyboard, overall much simpler than KWin, etc.

I knew why, but I've actually had much better luck with dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org/) * . The automatically-tiled / multiple desktops interface style works verrry well with a keyboard-centric usage style, but also more gracefully accommodates programs that expect a more conventional UI - ratpoison just seems to give up. (I used ratpoison exclusively for probably three or four years.)

* Other people have also had good experience with XMonad (http://xmonad.org/) or awesome (http://awesome.naquadah.org/), though the former requires Haskell (I got burned by GHC's portability issues, and requiring GHC for a window manager strikes me as a bit silly), and awesome strikes me as a bit dodgy.

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#29

Post by silentbicycle »

mmc wrote: post #13
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

So what you're saying is that one of the most demanded features has been in the CVS version since June of 2008, but hasn't made it into a stable release?

Re: A 'revisited' guide to GNU Screen

#30

Post by mkelly »

jacobolus wrote: post #27
silentbicycle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why this is relevant, rather than just linking to it?

It's not really that relevant IMO, but maybe fans of screen want to extend the screen approach to their whole computing experience? That's basically the goal of ratpoison, which is a window manager based around the idea of tiling and complete control via the keyboard, overall much simpler than KWin, etc.

On that note, I've just started using ion3 (http://www.modeemi.fi/~tuomov/ion/), which is a similarly-focused tiling, keyboard-friendly window manager. I'm still unsure about how useful it is on my laptop, but at work where I have huge monitors, it's great. I never move my windows anyway, so there's no point in spending time aligning them, or wasting the space between them. It is still awkward for certain applications, though.
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