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Comment by adgar | Hacker News Reader

> screen

Unless you only use GPL software, there's no reason to not use tmux these days. Well, maybe if you're on HP-UX or something.

http://tmux.sourceforge.net/

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I've switched from screen to tmux about a year or two ago, after decades of using screen.. and I'm perfectly happy with tmux, as it fits my needs.

However, it's not true that screen has no advantages over tmux. Each program has its own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, screen is scriptable via its Lua bindings, tmux is not. Screen has zmodem support built in, tmux does not. There are probably many other examples, since screen has a bazillion features which have been developed over decades, while tmux is relatively new (and its developers don't seem to care to duplicate every one of screen's features).

tmux is scriptable from the shell via its command-line arguments, so any language can script it.

It's certainly true that screen does have tons of small old features... but I sort of swept that in with "unless you're using HP-UX or something." zmodem support isn't exactly relevant to the overwhelming majority of programmers, but yes, I admit these things are still relevant to a few niches.

"tmux is scriptable from the shell via its command-line arguments, so any language can script it."

I'm not sure if tmux is scriptable to the same extent that screen is via screen's Lua bindings, as the latter probably exposes many of screen's internals, while scriptability of tmux is limited to what you could do with its command line arguments. I haven't researched the matter, though, so I may well be wrong.

Is tmux as available as screen?

I often have to fix servers that are not from own group, so all my knowledge is honed around tools that i can find anywhere.

Perhaps not, but tmux's bindings are nearly all backwards-compatible with screen's. Well, the default escape char is ctrl-B but I (and I think most folks) just remap it to ctrl-A immediately.

How do people use CTRL-A for screen without being driven batty that the emacs-style 'start-of-line' command is not available? I use that constantly!

I actually only learned that ctrl-A works in bash 3-4 months ago, and haven't yet picked a new screen/tmux escape and retrained to it. Mainly because these days, I only use screen when I WFH or am traveling, when I ssh into my workstation. Almost nobody has ssh rights to a production machine, so I'm actually struggling to think when I would use it from my workstation.

People rebind it. I bind it to ^o.

  # put this in your .screenrc
  escape ^Oo

or if you never use toggle-input-method, maybe C-\

  escape ^\\

I always rebind it to ^z. Since I never need to put a process in the background (I just open a new screen instead) when running screen, it never bothers me that that combo is a bit harder to type.

Pressing ^A then a in screen should deliver a single ^A to emacs.

I don't use CONTROL-A to go to the start of the line, instead I hit ESCAPE 0

It works because I have my shell configured to use vi mode for command line editing.

i use the ratpoison window manager (it works a lot like tmux/screen, but for x11) and have control+a set as its prefix key. i use tmux for some long-lasting remote sessions, so to send a control+a to the shell running under tmux, under ratpoison, i type control+a, a, control+a, a. yes, i do it a lot. no, i'm not going to change it.

Crtl-Z, you mean. Ctrl-A is for start of line in bash and emacs, so that won't do

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