Screen and Tmux

Posted Aug 29, 2024 19:27 UTC (Thu) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632)
In reply to: Screen and Tmux by ryanduve
Parent article: GNU Screen v.5.0.0 is released

> 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...