Script for taking full advantage of screen in X environment

[Torsten Scheck]

Dear fellow screen users:

My working environment is X with lots of xterms (in my case urxvt) and
I'm quite happy with this. But there have been many occasions, when I
wished that I were in a screen session, but I wasn't. To solve this
problem I use a script, which creates a new window in a shared screen
session for each new xterm. The script is bound to a keyboard shortcut
of my window manager (ion3).


/usr/local/bin/multiscreen
---------------8<---------------8<---------------
#!/bin/sh
# tested with debian

screen -x multiscreen -X eval "screen -t $$" other \
&& x-terminal-emulator -e screen -x multiscreen -p $$ \
|| x-terminal-emulator -e screen -S multiscreen
---------------8<---------------8<---------------

Rough explanation:

If there is no session named "multiscreen" then
  Create it in a new xterm.
else
  Send to the existing session commands to create a new screen-window
  with a unique title and switch back to previous window.
  Create a new xterm and display the newly created screen window.


It works for me: I can use screen features, when I need them. Otherwise
screen is transparent to my X working environment. (Except for the
missing xterm scrollback buffer, but I prefer screen's scrollback
history buffer anyway.)

As I haven't been a screen power user in the past, I'd be interested, if
there are better ways to accomplish screen integration in X.

Cheers,
Torsten

-- 
Torsten Scheck <address@hidden>  Jabber:address@hidden
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