Re: Promote Screen? Include .screenrc!

[holger . dinkel]

Hi,

first of all:
Thanks to all for the positive feedback!

What became clear to me is that indeed it might be a tedious task to create a
full-fledged .screenrc that fits every user's needs.  This is just impossible as
the tasks that screen is used for are diverse.

But the most important point of this discussion is the reason that made me start
it:  Screen lacks hints for the initial user. Like said, the screen-newbie is
greeted with a minimal welcome message about legal issues, whereas IMHO he
should be told e.g. the most important key commands...

The second most important feature would be a reasonable caption line that
displays the list of screens and highlights the current one (as suggested by
Aaron Davies).

The caption need not be too fancy, like
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

caption always "%{rk}%H %{wk}%n %{gk}%c %{yk}%M%d %{wk}%?%-Lw%?%{bw}%n*%f 
%t%?(%u)%?%{wk}%?%+Lw%?"
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

but it should present at least the screen titles.
So I propose a minimal configuration like this:
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caption always "%-Lw%{= W}%50>%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%<"
startup_message on
screen -t top 0 top 
screen -t bash 1 
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

The "top" window is created, so that the user can test the <CTRL>-<A>,<A>
functionality...


Additionally, the startup notification could also include the most important
key-bindings. Such as:
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 Press <CTRL>-<A> <A> to switch to the last used screen window\n\
 Press <CTRL>-<A> <C> to create a new screen window\n\
 Press <CTRL>-<A> <w> to see a list of screen windows\n\
 Press <CTRL>-<A> <?> to see a short help page\n\
 \n\
 Also see the screen man page for extensive documentation\n\
____________________________________________________________________________________________________


PS: A good screencast would be a very good idea and a helful ressource. Right
    now, I don't have the time to do it, but if someone can recommend a good
    screenrecorder, I might look into this in a couple of months...

PPS:I once gave a short introductory talk about screen to my colleagues, and
    especially the reconnect feature was of interest to them. A couple of days
    later, I saw one colleague running several instances of screen on the 
server so
    that she could reconnect to several shell instances running batch jobs 
(instead
    of using ONE screen instance with several windows ;-> )


Best wishes,

Holger Dinkel