Second I've started using screen a lot more than before. Specifically, I began running my emacs session inside screen a while back, so that I can connect to my home computer from other places and attach to my screen session and use the running emacs instance. More recently, I've switched to using tmux instead of screen but for the sake of keeping history, I'm posting the code and configuration I used to use here. tmux will be the subject of another post.
This is the .screenrc I used:
escape ^Oo
vbell off
# Scrollback buffer size in lines
defscrollback 5000
startup_message off
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{=kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B}%Y-%m-%d %{W}%c %{g}]'
# enable support for 256 colors
term screen-256color
terminfo rxvt-unicode 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm'
# fix for residual editor text. sometimes when you run an editor and
# close it, some of its text may stay visible. this fixes that
# problem.
altscreen on
screen -t emacs 0 emacs -nw
screen -t shell0
It changes the screen prefix to ^O so that it doesn't clash with the emacs shortcut. It turns off the visual bell, enlarges to scrollback buffer, turns off the welcome screen, adds a status line, enables 256 color support inside screen, enables alternate screen (so that residual text from some editors will not stay visible after closing them), and finally starts a shell and an emacs instance.I also added this code to my .stumpwmrc so that I can switch to emacs in the usual way (by pressing C-t C-e):
For some reason this sometimes fails to switch to emacs properly, but it usually does!(defcommand emacs-in-screen () () "attempts to switch to an emacs instance run in a gnu screen window called 'emacs', itself inside a urxvt instance." (let ((ret (run-shell-command "screen -X select emacs > /dev/null ; echo $?" t))) (if (eql (elt ret 0) #\0) (run-or-raise "urxvt" '(:class "URxvt")) (message "no screen session found.")))) (define-key *root-map* (kbd "C-e") "emacs-in-screen")
And one last thing. The GNU Screen version shipped with Arch lacks vertical split support. This AUR package contains the patch for vertical splitting. Unfortunately, it lacks another patch that stops screen from complaining about long $TERM values, so I made a new AUR package that applies this other patch, too. I found that the process of creating Arch packages is surprisingly easy. In this case, I just downloaded the other package, updated its PKGFILE, and made the source tarball using
makepkg --source.
