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After a Long wait, GNU Screen Gets Refreshed

Posted by timothy on from the s-in-gnu's-not-unix-stands-for dept.

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.

6 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. One question by n1ywb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does it finally have vsplit?

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    1. Re:One question by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 5, Informative

      The submitter used a link to the announcement of a 4.2.1 minor bugfix release, which isn't very informative if you want to know about new features in 4.2.x. They really should have linked to this announcement instead, which says:

      Hello everyone,
       
      it is my pleasure to announce release of GNU Screen v.4.2.0
       
      available at http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/screen/
      (I will also upload to ftp.gnu.org as soon as my access is authorized)
       
      Many are probably using it due to their distributions packaging
      development versions, so they know at least some of changes.
      Short list of them:
        * layouts
        * window groups
        * better mouse support
        * vertical split
        * new and expanded commands
       
      For full list of changes please check Changelog.
       
      Please note that due to some changes it may be not possible to attach
      to sessions created with older binaries.
       
      With this I also plan to put v.4 into maintenance mode and start
      developing v.5 with cleaned up source code, new features (some already
      in development tree, currently outside of official repository):
        * 256 color hardstatus
        * truecolor
        * firstline hardstatus
        * top line caption
        and more
       
      Amadeusz Sławiński

      And the Changelog is here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/tree/src/ChangeLog?h=screen-v4.

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  2. most useful? by Arathon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been using tmux for years now, so my experiential data say no.

  3. Screen has aged, and it shows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  4. Re:No screenshots by harrkev · · Score: 5, Informative

    Screen is actually surprisingly useful.

    You can throw jobs off to a "screen" instance that can run happily. Then, if you have to VPN in from home, you can grab the screen and pick up where you left off. Combine this with "nohup" and you can have jobs that run even when you log off, and you can regain console control from them at any time.

    In short, it is the "vnc" of the terminal world.

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  5. Headline should have read... by big_e_1977 · · Score: 4, Funny

    After a Long wait, GNU Screen Gets ^L