GNU Screen

• Ctrl+a ? Displays commands and their defaults
• Ctrl+a : Enter to the command prompt of screen
• Ctrl+a " Window list
• Ctrl+a 0 opens window 0
• Ctrl+a Rename the current window
• Ctrl+a Sends Ctrl+a to the current window
• Ctrl+a Create a new window (with shell)
• Ctrl+a Split current region horizontally into two regions
• Ctrl+a | Split current region vertically into two regions
• Ctrl+a tab Switch the input focus to the next region
• Ctrl+a Ctrl+a Toggle between current and previous region
• Ctrl+a Enter Copy Mode (use enter to select a range of text)
• Ctrl+a Paste text
• Ctrl+a Close all regions but the current one
• Ctrl+a Close the current region
• Ctrl+a Detach from the current screen session, and leave it running. Use to resume

• Ctrl+a :quit Closes all windows and closes screen session
• Ctrl+a Reloads screenrc configuration file (can alternatively use )

To create a named session, run screen with the following command:

$ screen -S session_name

To (re)name an existing a session, run the following command while screen is running:

Ctrl+a :sessionname session_name

To print a list of pid.tty.host strings identifying your screen sessions:

$ screen -list

To attach to a named screen session, run this command:

$ screen -x session_name

or

$ screen -r session_name

You can modify the default settings for Screen according to your preference either through a personal file which contains commands to be executed at startup (e.g. ) or on the fly in command mode (e.g. Ctrl+a ).

This service autostarts screen for the specified user (e.g. ). Running this as a system unit is important, because systemd --user instance is not guaranteed to be running and will be killed when the last session for given the user is closed.

It can be a good idea to change the default escape key, not only because "a" is usually typed with the left pinky, but also because Ctrl+a is mapped to the common command in GNU Readline and Bash-like shells.

The escape key can be changed with the option in , or the option to screen.

For example, if you find that you rarely type in your shell or editor, you could use escape ^Jj to set the escape key to . The second "j" means that a literal can be sent to the terminal via the sequence . For Dvorak keyboard users, () might be more convenient.

More exotic options include which sets the escape key to , or which sets it to .

The escape key is also called the "command character" in Screen documentation.

By default, the first screen window is 0. If you would rather never have a window 0 and start instead with 1, add the following lines on your configuration:

~/.screenrc

bind c screen 1
bind ^c screen 1
bind 0 select 10                                                            
screen 1

It is possible to get stuck in a nested screen session. A common scenario: you start an SSH session from within a screen session. Within the SSH session, you start screen. By default, the outer screen session that was launched first responds to commands. To send a command to the inner screen session, use , followed by your command. For example:

• Ctrl+a Detaches the inner screen session.
• Ctrl+a Kills the inner screen session.

For Bash and Zsh, add the following snippet to your or before your aliases:

~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

if [[ -z "$STY" ]]; then
   screen -xRR session_name
fi

By default, Screen uses an 8-color terminal emulator. To enable more colors, you need to be using a terminal that supports them and set the correct term value. This will use terminfo to describe how the ANSI escape codes will be interpreted. An entry in the terminfo database structure must exist, provides many common descriptions stored under .

First try the generic value:

~/.screenrc

term screen-256color

If that does not work, try setting it based on your terminal. When using xterm-based terminal:

When using rxvt-unicode:

As a last resort, try setting termcapinfo instead:

The default statusbar may be a little lacking. You may find this one more helpful:

Another possibility, taken from frodfrog's blog is:

As of Screen v5 (master branch currently) the escape codes have changed, you could use this instead:

~/.screenrc

truecolors on
hardstatus off
backtick 0 5 5 "/bin/date" '+%Y-%m-%d'
backtick 1 5 5 "/bin/date" '+%H:%M'
hardstatus alwayslastline '%{#00ff00}[ %H ][%{#ffffff}%= %{7}%?%-Lw%?%{1;0}%{1}(%{15}%n%f%t%?(%u)%?%{1;0}%{1})%{7}%?%+Lw%?%? %=%{#00ff00}][ %{#00a5ff}%{6}%0` %{#ffffff}%{7}%1`%{#00ff00} ]'

statusbar at top:

This one is pretty simple; just switch your current hardstatus line into a line with notification, and edit accordingly:

This will give you something like in the title of your terminal emulator. The caption supplies the date, current time, and colorizes your screen window collection.

The scroll buffer of GNU Screen can be accessed with Ctrl+a . However, this is very inconvenient. To use the scroll bar of e.g. xterm or Konsole, add the following line :

If you started a program outside Screen, but now you would like it to be inside, you can use reptyr to reparent the process from its current TTY to one inside screen.

Install the package.

Get the PID of the process (you can use for that). Now just enter the PID as argument to reptyr inside a screen window.

$ reptyr pid

If you want a different bash prompt when in a screen session, add the following to your :

With this setting, Screen will not make an ugly screen flash instead of a bell sound.

To get rid of the vertical bars:

$ ~/.screenrc

rendition so =00

To hide the horizontal bar, set the back and foreground color to default (d) and display a blank (" "):

If this does not work, try instead. For the default caption in black and white, use .

When you open a text editor like nano in screen and then close it, the text may stay visible in your terminal. To fix this, put the following:

~/.screenrc

altscreen on

Add following to :