LinuxCzar

Engineering Software, Linux, and Observability. The website of Jack Neely.    

Finding Love with GNU Screen

I’ve used GNU Screen for more years than I can count.  As I try to find some better console jabber clients (I’m not sure Bitlbee and I are cut out for each other) I started playing with my screen configuration.

Ever wanted screen to tell you if there was activity on another window in the background?  Have you wanted that information always in the status line not just flashed up for 5 seconds and then gone?  Stick this in your ~/.screenrc file:

msgwait 30
defmonitor on
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline "%-Lw%{= BW}%50>%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%< %=[%c, %D, %d/%m/%y]"

Don’t want to restart screen?  Type:

C-a :source $HOME/.screenrc

The “defmonitor on” option will cause screen to put a ‘@’ in the status line next to each window name that has had activity.  You can toggle the monitoring on and off per window with C-a M.

I found the status line here:

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~svan/configs/screenrc

Of course, the manual is always your friend:

http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual

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