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Chris Devers writes: > I can't stand that it wants to steal ctrl+A, which a decade of finger- > memory with Pine / readline / Cocoa / etc has trained me to > inextricably associate with "jump to start of the current line" > rather than "dump into shocking & surprising meta-cmmand mode, > completely eradicating your line of thought." That was the largest part of what kept me from using screen for a long time. Another part was that it breaks terminal scrollback by default -- you can't Shift-PageUp in xterm (or similar) to see what's in the thousands of lines of text that have already flown past your eyes. And another was that it doesn't (by default) maintain an alternate window, so running (say) vim scribbles on the carefully-maintained state you have in your main window. Clearly these default settings in screen are a source of enormous hate. The only saving grace is that it provides un-break-me options to fix it: # Unbreak scrollback in xterm-like things termcapinfo xterm*|rxvt*|kterm*|Eterm* ti@:te@ # Unbreak the alternate window in the virtual terminal altscreen on # Unbreak the STEALING OF MY BLOODY C-a KEY. C-6 is sufficiently # out-of-the-way to make a good choice, I think. escape ^^^^ > I've managed without it so far, and I've yet to be convinced that it > solves more hate than it generates... While entirely sharing your hate for screen, I find the most handy thing about it is the ability to replace long-running nohupped background jobs. Launch a screen, run whatever it is (in verbose mode, so you can see what's going on), then detach from the terminal, and go home. When you check on it the next day, you don't need to churn through a log file, or check whether the process is still alive, or whatever. Just reattach to the screen session, and you can immediately see where it got to. So while the software itself is unsurprisingly hateful, it's nonetheless useful too. -- Aaron CraneThere's stuff above here
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