Sometimes it surprises me seeing programs like this get updates. Screen always felt "finished" to me.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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So I've just learned two startling facts. 1) GNU Screen was still in development, and 2) that we used to have a NETHACK option, but it was removed???
From the man page:
nethack [ on | off ]
Changes the kind of error messages used by screen. When you are familiar with the game nethack, you may enjoy the nethack-style messages which will often blur the facts a little, but are much funnier to read. Anyway, standard messages often tend to be unclear as well.
This option is only available if screen was compiled with the NETHACK flag defined. The default setting is then determined by the pres ence of the environment variable $NETHACKOPTIONS and the file ~/.nethackrc - if either one is present, the default is on.
Damn! Last winter I heard somewhere Screen was died and I thought I should finally learn tmux. It seems Screen is still alive, after all! Great news.
Shucks, I switched from screen to tmux over a decade ago, simply because (a) screen wasn't a ubiquitous tool, and (b) tmux was superior in almost every way. I haven't encountered screen in the wild in years.
a) is still important; I like and use ripgrep and fd, but grep and find are still useful because they're always installed, everywhere that's even halfway POSIX. ripgrep and fd aren't everywhere - e.g. BusyBox. But screen isn't in that core toolset, so there was little reason to hang on to it.