frio.name

Handy screenrc Hack

When I started writing this post about four or five hours ago, it was because I wanted to mentioned one of Zed Shaw’s recent posts about how he wanted the “Mutt of Newsreaders”. Slightly further down in the post, he mentioned what he considered an essential toolkit for working with the console, including screen - a sentiment I strongly agree with. Of every tool I’ve used for the console, nothing makes it quite as useful as screen.

So I thought I’d share a vital few bits of my screenrc, that makes it much more useful on a day-to-day basis for me.

startup_message off # suppress the welcome message
vbell off # turn off visual bells
defscrollback 2000 # increase the size of the scrollback buffer

These can all go in either your /etc/screenrc (for system-wide configuration) or ~/.screenrc (for user-specific configuration). The best tweak, however, is one I found in some obscure corner of the web years ago:

caption always "%m/%d/%y %0c%{=b kW}  %l  %{=r kd}%-Lw%{= bd}%50>%n%f*%t%{-}%+Lw%<%{- Wk}"

Again, the above line goes in one of the screenrc files. I’ll admit I’ve no idea of what the syntax actually does there (I’ve never really had the inclination to decode it), but the effect is cool: it gives you a system clock, load average printout, and then a series of nameable tabs similar to a taskbar at the bottom of every screen session, hilighting the active screen.