LWN: Comments on "GNU Screen v.5.0.0 is released"

Screen and Tmux

enrico — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 14:11:53 +0000

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

mathstuf — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 12:15:20 +0000

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

ejr — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 21:13:14 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

mbunkus — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 20:40:34 +0000

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

gutschke — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:08:30 +0000

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

mathstuf — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:06:36 +0000

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.

GNU Screen strong points

jsakkine — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 07:08:28 +0000

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 ;-)

Screen and Tmux

gutschke — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 03:50:01 +0000

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 has the better display model

mathstuf — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 18:02:54 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

bpearlmutter — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 09:37:35 +0000

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 has the better display model

intelfx — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 07:10:11 +0000

> 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

quotemstr — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 01:58:41 +0000

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 and Tmux

bluss — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 16:23:57 +0000

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.

Screen and Tmux

tzafrir — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:43:03 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

Deleted user 129183 — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 20:36:53 +0000

> 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

ErikF — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 19:14:55 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

mathstuf — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 17:48:42 +0000

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

stressinduktion — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 14:34:17 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

marduk — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 12:34:45 +0000

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".

Another use of tmux: testing

marcihm — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:27:25 +0000

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 ...

Zellij

taladar — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 07:46:51 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

bluss — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 05:33:03 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

clump — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 21:16:51 +0000

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

Screen and Tmux

marduk — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 21:14:39 +0000

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

tux3 — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:27:35 +0000

>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

sb — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:01:09 +0000

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

rc00 — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 19:39:15 +0000

> 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

gwolf — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 19:27:15 +0000

> 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

ryanduve — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 19:01:02 +0000

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?