After a Long wait, GNU Screen Gets Refreshed 77
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.
most useful? (Score:5, Informative)
a bit late (Score:1, Informative)
uh what http://tmux.sourceforge.net/
Screen has aged, and it shows (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...
Re:No screenshots (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.
Re:Screen has aged, and it shows (Score:4, Informative)
Re:One question (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 [gnu.org] instead, which says:
And the Changelog is here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/tree/src/ChangeLog?h=screen-v4 [gnu.org].
Re:most useful? (Score:4, Informative)
To my knowledge for screen:
-screen can target ptys/realserial ports. Useful alternative to minicom or similar. Nowadays it's the most likely application to be installed 'by chance' with that capability (once upon a time, I would generally find cu, but that's almost never around by chance anymor)
-a split screen can have different people typing concurrently in different panes.
tmux more gracefully handles multiple terminal sizes connecting and tends to keep you from leaving a shared attach behind when you start trying to do split and such. tmux naturally understands terminal title set sequence and has more handy access to a lot of the best tricks. So 95% of the time tmux hits what is more important to me, but I do get a bit put out when I have a desire to take care of one of the above cases.
Most useful? (Score:1, Informative)
The most useful? You mean tmux? Not this old antiquated, bug ridden piece of code, right?