Gnu Screen

So in one of my previous posts I told you about terminal multiplexing and also mentioned how cool it was. Now is the time to introduce you to GNU Screen. The wikipedia page is a good introduction already. But I should talk about it from my point of view, about how I use it. To be honest, if I knew of the abilities of tmux at the time I got to know about screen, I would have just started using tmux. It isn’t too hard to switch though. It would just take a day or two of getting used to the new short cuts. Or you could go ahead and manually configure your shortcuts to keep you happy. ...

I thought everyone knew it. But very few actually do. Especially young software engineers. Probably everyone uses a GUI today and don’t interact much with the terminal. In fact many of the new hires at my firm have only heard of the term multiplexer, but never really bothered to use one. So I thought I’d just write a bit about it. I used to be normal putty user till 2011 (which is a shame). Then my friend introduced me to screen. At first I thought “OMG! What a mess! I would have to remember so many commands!”. But in less than a month I was a big fan of screen and had learned a lot more than necessary information about it. When you work in a company that gives you laptops as your primary workstation, your putty session dies off when you dock your laptop off or go to the next floor. So screen helped me maintain my session and made me less worried about saving work on the terminal. And it is so convenient, when I have long running tests or scripts, I just don’t bother waiting, switch to another window and keep working. ...