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A guide to GNU Screen

redhatmagazine.com

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Re: A guide to GNU Screen

#2

Post by dilap »

I tend to spend all my time in emacs, and for me the paging stuff and special keystrokes just get in the way -- but the ability to detach from a session and resume it later is awesome. For a program that just does that and otherwise gets out of your way, I recommend checking out dtach:

http://dtach.sourceforge.net/

The two second tutorial:

$ dtach -A /tmp/ek -z emacs # start or resume session identified by /tmp/ek

To detach from the session, type control-backslash. (The -z disables suspend with Control-Z.)

Re: A guide to GNU Screen

#3

Post by signa11 »

dilap wrote: post #2

I tend to spend all my time in emacs, and for me the paging stuff and special keystrokes just get in the way -- but the ability to detach from a session and resume it later is awesome. For a program that just does that and otherwise gets out of your way, I recommend checking out dtach: http://dtach.sourceforge.net/ The two second tutorial: $ dtach -A /tmp/ek -z emacs # start or resume session identified by /tmp/ek To…

multitty emacs (http://lorentey.hu/project/emacs.html) already allows you to do just that either from a graphical or a vanilla-tty environment.

Re: A guide to GNU Screen

#4

Post by far33d »

I run screen in every one of my terminals and it has made me much more efficient. The keystrokes are more natural than tab switching and detaching is great. It's especially nice to label your screens so you can quickly tell the difference between local and remote shells (live vs staging, for instance).

Re: A guide to GNU Screen

#5

Post by newt0311 »

dilap wrote: post #2

I tend to spend all my time in emacs, and for me the paging stuff and special keystrokes just get in the way -- but the ability to detach from a session and resume it later is awesome. For a program that just does that and otherwise gets out of your way, I recommend checking out dtach: http://dtach.sourceforge.net/ The two second tutorial: $ dtach -A /tmp/ek -z emacs # start or resume session identified by /tmp/ek To…

Not quite. Some things like back-scrolling and multi-mode are still incredibly useful.

Re: A guide to GNU Screen

#6

Post by pivo »

dilap wrote: post #2

I tend to spend all my time in emacs, and for me the paging stuff and special keystrokes just get in the way -- but the ability to detach from a session and resume it later is awesome. For a program that just does that and otherwise gets out of your way, I recommend checking out dtach: http://dtach.sourceforge.net/ The two second tutorial: $ dtach -A /tmp/ek -z emacs # start or resume session identified by /tmp/ek To…

Screen's better than detach because, for one, you can create multiple terminals in a single screen session, like a tabbed GUI terminal, and then detach and re-attach to them all at once.

I use a .screenrc that provides a textural "toolbar" at the bottom of the terminal so it's easy to see how many you've got running. Configuration is listed on this page: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060422.html

Re: A guide to GNU Screen

#8

Post by makecheck »

The information/example for "hardstatus" in the article is nice. I had only used "screen" briefly, and didn't realize that a constantly-visible status line was possible. The default configuration, which is to display no evidence that "screen" is running, isn't as useful in my opinion.

Re: A guide to GNU Screen

#9

Post by dilap »

dilap wrote: post #2

I tend to spend all my time in emacs, and for me the paging stuff and special keystrokes just get in the way -- but the ability to detach from a session and resume it later is awesome. For a program that just does that and otherwise gets out of your way, I recommend checking out dtach: http://dtach.sourceforge.net/ The two second tutorial: $ dtach -A /tmp/ek -z emacs # start or resume session identified by /tmp/ek To…

Hmm, I appear to have spread some confusion.

To be clear: dtach implements just one of screen's many features, the ability to detach and resume a session.

If you want all the other stuff that screen does, great! But if you don't then those other things can get in your way, and you might want to give dtach a try.

(E.G., my own personal style is to launch multiple terminals from within emacs, so I don't need screen's multiterminal ability or it's cut and paste, &c.)

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