GNU Screen v.5.0.0 is released

Version 5.0.0 of GNU Screen has been released. Notable changes in this release include new commands for authentication, input into multiple windows at the same time, and to turn on/off truecolor support.

From:		Alex Naumov <alexander_naumov-AT-opensuse.org>
To:		screen-devel-AT-gnu.org, screen-users-AT-gnu.org, info-gnu-AT-gnu.org
Subject:		GNU Screen v.5.0.0 is released
Date:		Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:20:39 +0200
Message-ID:		<CABPy6+wk29PCNFh82TOnRe69pAXQuT-f+O76ciScZ4yB_Q-SRg@mail.gmail.com>
Archive-link:		Article

Hi everyone, I'm glad to announce the new release of GNU screen. Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. The 5.0.0 release includes the following changes to the previous release 4.9.1: * 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 * New commands: - auth [on|off] Provides password protection - status [top|up|down|bottom] [left|right] The status window by default is in the bottom-left corner. This command can move status messages to any corner of the screen. - truecolor [on|off] - multiinput Input to multiple windows at the same time * Removed commands: - time - debug - password - maxwin - nethack * Fixes: - Screen buffers ESC keypresses indefinitely - Crashes after passing through a zmodem transfer - Fix double -U issue Release is available for download at: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/screen/ Please report any bugs or regressions. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. Cheers, Alex

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Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 19:01 UTC (Thu) by ryanduve (subscriber, #127786) [Link] (22 responses)

I started using Tmux in the early-to-mid 2010s when I needed persistence for remote shells in a physics lab. I saw Screen was an option, but understood it was basically dead. Since then, I've become accustomed to using Tmux but never really use it for anything besides remote persistence and screen splitting at work.

Seeing a new release of Screen makes me wonder whether there's any reason I should invest in learning it. Does it provide any functionality that isn't covered by Tmux? Are there any other reasons to either use both or switch to Screen?

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 19:27 UTC (Thu) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link] (12 responses)

> Seeing a new release of Screen makes me wonder whether there's any reason I should invest in learning it. Does it provide any functionality that isn't covered by Tmux?

I am a "screen" user. I have considered tmux for the same reasons you mention (and that made many people move away from it), but my muscles already learnt screen's keybindings and I'm used to its behavior. It does not have many annoying bugs (some display alignment issues with UTF-8-heavy displays), but nothing that irks me enough.

As far as I understand, tmux and screen are basically the same, and you won't find real reasons to switch from one to the other.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 19:39 UTC (Thu) by rc00 (guest, #164740) [Link] (1 responses)

> As far as I understand, tmux and screen are basically the same, and you won't find real reasons to switch from one to the other.

Technically speaking, they do have a lot of overlap.

The issue I most recently remember was RHEL deprecating screen with the release of 7.6 and removing it entirely with 8.0. If this new release gets them to change their position, that would open up more options but until then, RHEL and their downstreams own a significant percentage of the market share and therefore the tooling therein.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 21:16 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

RHEL dropping screen caused me to learn tmux. Configuring tmux to act like screen has helped the transition.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 21:14 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] (7 responses)

Same here. Long time screen user and while I know tmux is the new(er) thing every time I try it it's either I can't fight decades of muscle memory or there's this teeny tiny behavioral difference that I just can't (don't want to) get used to, so I go back to screen. Plus all my little scripts, commands etc I've been using for years that do something with screen I'd have to figure out how to do the same thing with tmux.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 5:33 UTC (Fri) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link] (6 responses)

One way ticket fight muscle memory is to try to replicate all key bindings in tmux.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 12:34 UTC (Fri) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] (5 responses)

The Ctrl-B/Ctrl-A thing I've done. Other things are not so 1:1. There are just some things that are done differently. Those things are probably take the most to "get used to", more so than keybindings. If the "pattern" is different then you have to get used to the new pattern. Either that or you spend a lot of time trying to make it look/feel like the former pattern. I've spent a long long time getting screen to work "exactly the way I want it" so losing all that and starting over is just a lot of mental investment at a time when usually I'm just trying to "get work done".

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 3:50 UTC (Thu) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910) [Link] (4 responses)

Ctrl-A or Ctrl-B are way too overloaded in other contexts. I never thought they were a good choice for a screen multiplexer. I have long since gotten into the habit of redefining the escape key. I usually make it ^]

That admittedly interferes with "telent", and at least a few times a month I get caught by surprise when that happens. But its sufficiently rare, that it really doesn't matter much. It certainly is an improvement over the default settings.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 18:06 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

What typically uses `^A`? I've not found much that it masks for me. `^B` however is "page-scroll" in Vim which is far more common than "increment word" for me.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 18:08 UTC (Thu) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910) [Link] (2 responses)

Both Emacs and readline (e.g. bash) use ^A to jump the cursor to the beginning of the line. I press is many times a day -- in fact, I press it a lot more frequently than interacting with "screen"

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 20:40 UTC (Thu) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Nitpick & further info: in Emacs itself, readline's Emacs mode & similar tools[1] Ctrl+A is "move to beginning of line", Ctrl+B is "move one char backwards". readline can be switched to a vi mode, though.

[1] zsh has its own line editor implementation that while similar to readline is not actually readline. It does have both Emacs & vi modes, too, though.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 13, 2024 12:15 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Ah, right emacs :) . I put everything I can into vi-alike mode, so such bindings are relegated to remoting into machines with broken terminfo databases where home/end or arrows don't work (I commonly on a laptop, so they're not too inaccessible). Luckily the latest macOS 14 now ships with a useful tmux entry in its terminfo database, so that is slowly disappearing as well ;) .

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 2, 2024 9:37 UTC (Mon) by bpearlmutter (subscriber, #14693) [Link]

I am in exactly that situation. I've been using "screen" for a long time, and I use only a tiny subset of its functionality. I could switch to "tmux" but that would be a hassle, and I don't see much upside since I imagine I'd use the same tiny functionality subset, and I'd have to figure out how to configure it to my tastes and update various support files.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Nov 6, 2024 14:11 UTC (Wed) by enrico (guest, #174472) [Link]

Well... screen 5 broke my configuration, and if I have to learn something new I'd rather learn something with more modern features and that doesn't stop development for a decade or two...

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 20:01 UTC (Thu) by sb (subscriber, #191) [Link] (1 responses)

One reason might be that you can disable the alternate screen (termcapinfo ... ti@:te@ in .screenrc) and still get usable scrollback data when scrolling up in the terminal emulator. Tmux has some kind of logic to skip output to the terminal, with the result that its own scrollback buffer is complete but the terminal emulator's is not.

Another reason might have been the funny and whimsical "nethack" messages, which have now been dropped.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 20:27 UTC (Thu) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link]

>Another reason might have been the funny and whimsical "nethack" messages, which have now been dropped

Aw, it died before I found out about it!
Everything looks SO boring now

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 14:34 UTC (Fri) by stressinduktion (subscriber, #46452) [Link] (4 responses)

Screen can attach to serial terminals, which I don't think tmux can do, yet?

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 17:48 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I don't think tmux is likely to be interested in that. Screen is fine to keep it though (I definitely used it in courses for that purpose).

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 19:14 UTC (Fri) by ErikF (subscriber, #118131) [Link] (2 responses)

I just use picocom (possibly inside of tmux) for the rare occasions that I need to connect using serial ports.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 22:43 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

I tried to use several others, but found screen to be the one that Just Worked as a serial console.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 12, 2024 21:13 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

Yup. minicom also tends to "just work" for me, but I'd rather use one tool than two for this.

Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 30, 2024 20:36 UTC (Fri) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183) [Link] (1 responses)

> Are there any other reasons to either use both or switch to Screen?

Honestly, I have used Screen only once in my life just because I needed the ‘detach session’ feature, but my only reason to choose it over Tmux was that it had the better licence. Otherwise they’re largely equivalent, I think?

Screen and Tmux

Posted Sep 1, 2024 16:23 UTC (Sun) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

Very much the same feature set, but tmux appears to be slightly more actively maintained and was much quicker to adopt new features, such as terminal hyperlink support or other small things one might want.

Zellij

Posted Aug 30, 2024 7:46 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Just for completeness sake, even though I use tmux personally, zellij is another modern alternative in the same space as screen and tmux.

Another use of tmux: testing

Posted Aug 30, 2024 8:27 UTC (Fri) by marcihm (subscriber, #144965) [Link]

Besides persistence and multiplexing, tmux really shines for testing interactive terminal applications. You can easily have a test-script that starts a program in a tmux session and send (the test-script) keystrokes to the program as well retrieve the current terminal content. Really great for testing programs, that have a complex terminal-layout, e.g. mailers or file-managers. I dont know, if screen can do such things ...

Screen has the better display model

Posted Sep 2, 2024 1:58 UTC (Mon) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link] (2 responses)

Screen's display model is just better than tmux's. In screen, multiple clients can connect to a screen session and each one gets its own layout. In tmux, every connected clients gets the same Procrustean layout. In screen, you can have two windows, and client A can be set to window 0 while client B sees window 1. tmux doesn't work like that. Yeah, in tmux, you can create a new session and give each session its own window, but that's a PITA. screen's clients are instead just logically independent, as they should be.

Screen has the better display model

Posted Sep 2, 2024 7:10 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

> In screen, you can have two windows, and client A can be set to window 0 while client B sees window 1. tmux doesn't work like that.

Oh, it absolutely does. It needs a bit of setting up to work like that, but the end result is better than what screen can do: https://github.com/intelfx/bin/tree/master/util/tmx

Screen has the better display model

Posted Sep 3, 2024 18:02 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

For clarity, the relevant flag is `tmux new-session -t <target-session>` to get a new view onto an existing session.

GNU Screen strong points

Posted Sep 12, 2024 7:08 UTC (Thu) by jsakkine (subscriber, #80603) [Link]

I wrote down my perks favoring screen: https://social.kernel.org/notice/Alv4I6PnDUdgTViJyy

After using tmux for quite a few years I'm considering returning to GNU screen, as my window layouts are trivial, and I end up requiring it anyway, given the unique functionality it has. I switched in early summer back back to vim from neovim for similar reasons, i.e. the unique functionality it has matters me more than 10000 Lua plugins ;-)