Screen is your friend (was Re: [techtalk] Mutt functionality)

Telsa Gwynne hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Sat Jul 7 09:47:20 EST 2001


On Sat, Jul 07, 2001 at 11:15:46AM +1000 or thereabouts, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> 
> A tailor made solution for this kind of thing is the 'screen' utility.

screen has to be one of the most underrated apps there is. So many
people don't know about it. I prefer it over kterm's tabbed terminal
windows and powershell (gnome-terminal-based similar idea) because
it is all keyboard-driven and you don't need to lift your hands to
the mouse to switch. 

I first met it many years ago, when telneting from one site, when I
was on some really really old terminal, to another site which had
no entry for that terminal in the termcap file. It ended up with a
dumb terminal or something and whilst I knew what ed was, I certainly
could not use it to edit replies in mail. 

I started using screen because screen pretended "I am a vt100",
the remote site knew about vt100s, and I could thus use an editor 
where the cursor moved around the screen. 

Then I discovered the "resume session" facility. Since this link
was very dodgy, this too quickly became a godsend.

All in all, the feature of multiple 'screens' was actually a minor
one at first. It was the "I am a vt100" that hooked me at the time!

Before I had a monitor that would do X (and this is only two or
three years ago :)), I lived inside screen. I still use it a lot and
I still make sure it's installed on any machine I am going to be
using.

Telsa




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