GNU Screen 5.0 released

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

The 5.0.0 release includes the following changes to the previous release 4.9.1:

Rewritten authentication mechanism
Add escape %T to show current tty for window
Add escape %O to show number of currently open windows
Use wcwdith() instead of UTF-8 hard-coded tables
New commands:
- auth [on|off] Provides password protection
- status [top|up|down|bottom] [left|right] The status window by default is in bottom-left corner. This command can move status messages to any corner of the screen.
- truecolor [on|off]
- multiinput Input to multiple windows at the same time
Removed commands:
- time
- debug
- password
- maxwin
- nethack
Fixes:
- Screen buffers ESC keypresses indefinitely
- Crashes after passing through a zmodem transfer
- Fix double -U issue

10 comments

I thought screen was abandonware after RHEL removed it in 2019 and recommended tmux instead.
- Me too! This is certainly news to me!
@JRepin For most purposes, I think tmux is the better software.
- Unless you copy and paste. In which case just stab yourself in the eye of you are using tmux.
  
  Agreed, tmux copy-pasting is so horrendous I'd rather open a new window, less the file and copy with my mouse
- I have a lot of trouble with the window/pane management. Moving panes to a different window is rather difficult. The server>session>window>pane hierarchy also seems way too deep for my humble needs.
  
  The fact that the active window syncs between sessions is also really odd. Why can't I look at different windows on different devices?
Removed commands: nethack

What? screen had nethack builtin?
- And what did it do? 👀

10 comments