I don’t use GNU Screen so I don’t have much to say here, but I do know it’s a popular tool among the kind of people who read OSNews, so a new major release should be covered here. In case you’re not aware, “Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells”. Basically, it’s window manager for terminals.
↫ GNU Screen 5.0 announcement
- Rewritten authentication mechanism
- Add escape %T to show current tty for window
- Add escape %O to show number of currently open windows
- Use wcwdith() instead of UTF-8 hard-coded tables
You can download the tarball yourself, or just wait until the update hits your distribution of choice.
*nod* For the longest time, people were saying “GNU screen is basically abandoned. Use tmux.”
…the problem is, I had no need for the extra splitting-related features tmux offered, it was unable to replicate my multi-line statusbar layout until somewhere around Kubuntu 20.04 LTS, and I actually USE the support for acting as a serial terminal that tmux omitted as “unnecessary”/out-of-scope.
(Yes, other terminal programs exist in the Ubuntu package repos… but GNU Screen doesn’t make me re-read a full manual to refresh my memory on how to spend five times as long setting up a connection every time I need to connect to a microcontroller or access the serial console on my router. It just works.)
Yeah, I thought it was abandoned. Still works though. tmux is great as well. For my purposes either will work.
Screen is a great utility. I mainly use it to disconnect from sessions to my linux server while keeping them running, mostly weechat for IRC or bigger wget downloads. Great to see that there is active development going on, even if I probably don`t need the new features
FYI, you can do that without screen, but by far screen/tmux is the easiest way of doing it. Its also nice when doing terrible things inside docker containers. You should only run a single service in a docker container and just create another one for another service, which is super easy and should be done 100% of the time even in dev. On the other hand, I’ve found having screen/tmux there to allow it temporarily is a fine lazy substitute. I’m a lazy man.. Hangs head in shame.
> FYI, you can do that without screen
Good of you to tell him how instead of rambling on with nothing useful.
I used to use GNU Screen to prevent commands from terminating when I would inevitably be timed out by SSH and kicked off the server. To be honest I haven’t really had much reason beyond that for it. With screen, SSH could time out all it wants but the processes would remain running in the background. Bringing these proceese back to the terminal was a simple command away with screen.