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Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

Oddly, it doesn't mention tmux (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/), a newer project that implements a similar terminal multiplexer. It was redesigned from the ground up to more cleanly accommodate several features that have been grafted onto the screen codebase. (It also has a BSD license, FWIW.)

After years, screen still doesn't do vertical screen splits. It turned out to be faster to just start from scratch.

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Honestly, it would be odd for a tmux article to go without mentioning screen but there is nothing odd about a screen article not mentioning tmux.

Speaking of which, I would like to see an article on tmux. Every now and then a screen article pops up and a few people chime in with the vague advantages of the BSD-licensed tmux, but I haven't seen any actual articles on tmux.

I'll put it in my queue of things to write about. Honestly, if I just gathered together content from my comments, I'd already be halfway there...

I use both. The only big difference? Besides the license? Screen uses 'Ctrl+A' while tmux uses 'Ctrl+B' and screen -r (to reattach) is replaced by tmux attach. That's it, for me at least. tmux seems to have a lot more features, but I only use 10% of them.

The biggest difference as far as I'm concerned is that it has vertical screen splitting and xmonad / dwm-style automatic tiled layouts built in. I've also looked into the codebases for both, and if I were working on new features, I would far rather work on tmux's - it's much cleaner.

An easily changed option is not a big difference.

From what I can tell, screen has better handling of colors. tmux seems to mess up the <Esc>[90m; -like sequence for colors 8-15.

Also, I like the ability to highlight screen's current screen with colored parentheses.

Tmux's splitting is nice, but not quite as useful to me as screen's version. Screen will let me put any of my existing windows in a "pane" while tmux won't (or maybe it does and the docs aren't clear enough for me).

Another thing I found useful with screen was having multiple terminals attached to the same screen session, with each terminal viewing different windows. Tmux will let multiple terminals attach to a single session, but they all see the same thing (again, maybe I just haven't figured out how to do this yet).

Neither of these are deal breakers for me though. I switched from screen a couple months ago, and I've been a happy tmux user since.

Vertical splitting has been available in screen-git for over a year.

why, oh why do I learn of this jewel only just now - after years of being pissed at screen?

Please accept my heartfelt thanks for pointing me (and hopefully many other people) to this awesome piece of software.

Screen how it should have worked from the beginning.

You completely sold me the moment I pressed ^B= and then used the cursor keys(!) to scroll the window (what HORROR - intuitive scrolling).

Thank you ever so much.

You made my day.

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