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After a Long wait, GNU Screen Gets Refreshed
New submitter jostber (304257) writes "It's been a long wait, but now GNU Screen, the most useful CLI windows manager around, is available. Version 4.2.1 was released a couple of days ago and the maintainer's release news is here." There are fewer commits than you might expect for software that's had six years since its last major update, but that could be because the developers have had 23 years to knock out the major bugs.
Does it finally have vsplit?
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I've been using tmux for years now, so my experiential data say no.
Does it finally handle curses applications properly? Or does the screen management still get mangled?
I read the internet for the articles.
What's it look like?
uh what http://tmux.sourceforge.net/
I use screen every single day. But it has aged, and not that well. Also, the quality of the job it does is directly dependent on how good the $TERM and ncurses stack is, and that varies wildly. It used to be much worse, but it can still be rather bad if you have to shell to old crap. Or the bells-and-whistles piece of crap that passes as a terminal emulator in the frisky desktop-environment is buggy (easy to work around: open an xterm).
The usual alternative to screen is tmux (http://tmux.sf.net), which is much newer and has a better feature set. Google for "tmux versus screen". It also had the advantage of a non-dead upstream, but I hope GNU screen upstream is back into highly active mode for good...
After a Long wait, GNU Screen Gets ^L
Though perhaps not as GNU Screen.
I was at UCSD from 1981 to 1986 and did lots of BSD hacking on 4.1 and 4.3 (we skipped 4.2 and used a patched 4.1 until 4.3 arrived), From about 1984 on I recall using the screen command many times a day as I hopped between terminals and systems.
Look at who posts on this article and you will see who the real nerds are.
Screen was the first piece of software that I ever downloaded and compiled. That was almost 23 years ago. It was awesome. It gave me lots of virtual terminals on my shiny VT100. I still use it when I have to get stuff done on a slow remote connection. Long live screen!
Terminal multiplexers such as screen and tmux still have their place. Not only do they allow you to organize your terminals by task, but they are also detachable from your console. This allows you to (example) start a build at the office, where your machine physically resides, then later from home SSH into your work machine and reattach to the tmux / screen session.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
I know I shouldn't. But every time I use it, I get trapped and have to pull up another xterm/console to kill it. It wouldn't be so bad if the "quit" commands were the first thing in the man page. And why ^A? I use ^A for 'start-of-line' all the time, and get annoyed when I realize it didn't work after I finished my paragraph. Now, ^X^C (no), F10 (no), ~. (no), M:q! (no), ^Q (no), M-F4 (no) argh!
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
The most useful? You mean tmux? Not this old antiquated, bug ridden piece of code, right?
> If you want multiple consoles, it's not like every Linux/BSD/OS X/Solaris distro doesn't have a button right there for you to open a freaking bazillion of them!!!
While you can use screen for that, that's not the most common/useful use case these days. One very handy use case is a session from a mobile device. A 4G connection is often briefly interrupted. With screen, an interruption in your connection doesn't reset your session. So you can continue to edit a file as your devices is handed off to different towers, and not lose anything when you're between towers. Automatic reconnect in your SSH client is handy in this case too.
Other variants of this include persistent sessions between devices - you can start working on your desktop, then pick right up where you left off on your laptop.
You can also have multiple task-based sessions going remotely. So you might have a "handle email" screen set up and a "program web site" screen set up. You can SSH in and choose either environment.
Tell that to the original developers of screen...
I read the internet for the articles.
Multiple terminals w/o networking available. Though, I might be tempted to get second usb/serial connector going instead.
I used screen a lot a few years ago for running long-term tasks in my server which I needed to access from different places (home, university, friends pc, etc), and it was wonderful.
In fact, just a few weeks ago I used it again (can't remember what for though) and it was great to see that it had aged really well.
Granted, I only use screen for the most basic of functions, so maybe people who want more will find it lacking but for a simple tool, it does what it does very well.
For a tool that's probably old enough to be a grandfather, that's quite interesting. If you don't think that's compelling you're probably in the wrong site.
WTF is this "button" you speak of?
Seriously though, in addition to the use cases others have mentioned I get a lot of mileage out of starting a REPL in a screen (or now, tmux) session and just letting it run -- it's easy then to re-attach and occasionally debug issues or upgrade code. I've had some Erlang jobs running for years like that.
I can't hear this announcement via my tmux session. The GNU projects expects us to switch back after being abandonware for this long?
Though I actually often use screen sharing for things like this. Heck, I use screen sharing (built into OS X and probably every other modern GUI) to another machine in my office, to use my preferred keyboard/trackball!
Actually, this is a good story. I mean, nobody gives a shit about some patch release of screen, but maybe someone reading these comments will learn about tmux and use that instead. It's like Republicans that are happy Barack Obama was elected because George W Bush is no longer the worst President ever.
Sure there have been lots of bells and whistles added in the last 20 years, but none of them have been "must have".
If by 'screen sharing' you mean VNC or RDP: that is often acceptable within a single LAN. But when VPN'ing in from home, the latency can be tiresome. With a character-based interface, there is of course still latency, but it is much less tiresome because the stream is a tiny trickle compared to the graphical modes.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Screen is just another kind of these programs like Vim and Emacs, by which I mean obscure UNIX programs which just hamper your workflow with their clunkiness and extremely awkward keyboard shortcuts. These programs actually have blazing features, but they just throw usability out of window and have a terrible learning curve. Sure, these are command line tools and they are not even expected to be the clicky-click fun multimedia experience, but for example the shortcut to deattach a screen, a very common feature, is Ctrl-A, and after that separately press D. That just shows...no taste at all.
Your parents are antiquated like screen, you are new and fancy (and only alive because your parents came before you) like tmux. Somemtimes I want to talk with a responsible adult instead of a whiny kid like you.
tmux is a single solution tool that fit a very common use-case
screen is a multi solution tool that works well for a lot of corner cases _and_ in the common use-case
obviously you only use it for the one common use-case, so to you tmux is most usefull. to a lot of other people tmux wont even work (lacking features). screen however will always chuck along like that old rusty tractor - but at least it will chuck along and not be parked away indefinetely because its a fancy useless tmux sports car.