Hello Linus, I personally use screen a lot. I have a few screen sessions running: - a main screen carring 70 windows. Where I do my daily work and read my mail on. I recompiled screen to support more than 40 winodws. This screen session runs on a well connected machine. And consumes 175M resistent memory and 450M virtual memory. That's mainly because I have 5000 lines of scrollback buffer in each window and I had to recompile screen with all it's buffers 2x to fight a symtom that it always crashed for me when I resized it to fullscreen on a monitor with resolution of 1600x1200. Yes I did fight symptoms some times even if I don't like it. But had you ever a look at the screen source code. It does make you puke. - a local screen. If I do something on a local machine I don't open a single terminal I open a screen session with 5 windows. Even if I only need a single shell. The local screen only stays open as long as I am logged in. I switch machines often. I have a workstation at home, one at university, a laptop and one at work. - a console screen (I do a lot of system administration) so the serial consoles of the main servers at university are connected to a screen session. Often are up to 5 people are connected to that session. When you have to do some sort of maintance work we often do a telephone conference while everyone sees what is going on. - a so called development screen. As you can imagine having 70 windows open you do a lot of context switches and as you stated before "do one thing and do it well" does not work that way when there is you mailreader in the way on window 6, so when I do something I have to focus on I use the development screen. For short projects I use the development screen. - one screen for work related stuff. > I actually like screen as a way to keep connections around. But the > whole multiplexing is wrong, wrong, wrong. It violates the "do one > thing, and do it well" thing. It makes screen do two things, and do > them really badly as a result. so true, as I stated above. When I notice that I go sideways I use one screen per topic. > And the "window manager" part is kind of a funny hack, but let's face > it, you can do better by using separate windows. Why I started to use screen is because I often switch workstations. And I want to be able to go on where I left of. So I have the same environment on every machine I have access to and synchronize this environment. I use fvwm as window manager and have something configured I call SmartStart. This is a fvwm function which focus an application if it is already running and start it if it is not running. Ctrl Shift s => Main Screen Ctrl Shift l => Local Screen Ctrl Shift o => Opera ... (thinkpad) [~] grep SmartStart .fvwm2rc | wc -l 32 > And the multiplexor could have been done (and historically _has_ been > done) better, by not limiting it to terminal sessions. I actually have a macro for university that allows me to start X application out of my screen session but most of the time I use local X applications or use ssh forwarding if I have to get it from a remote machine. > But the *combination* of all three is just evil and stupid. And the > choice of ctrl-A as the default command sequence (can you even > override it? Don't know, don't care) is just insanity. yes you can, but you get used to it. > networking, and you'd generally use ssh tunnelling for it and > ssh-agent. But screen was never very good at it. My main screen is running in its own ssh-agent session. So does my work screen. My local has automatically the ssh-agent session from my desktop session. > IOW, I think screen sucks because it tries to do totally independent > things, and then mixes them up in nasty ways, and for historical > reasons uses a bad break character too. Well, I have to aggreee with you. Sometimes I come back to a windows where I stopped in the middle of doing something. And that is bad. However screen makes me work faster and makes it possible to switch locations often and pick up where you left of. It's biggest strength it's it biggest weakness, too. My screen configuration have dozens of people copied. I have this fancy sticky status bar on the bottom. http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~sithglan/shot.png Thomas - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
