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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.

2 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. 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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  2. 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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