GNU Screen

If you would like to know about tmux, an alternative, click here.

GNU Screen allows you to run and seperate multiple login sessions within a seperate terminal window. This program is also useful for dealing with multiple programs from the terminal and seperating programs from the session that started the program, making it possible so remote processes continue running even when the user has disconnected from the SSH connection. In our case, we can use this program to keep an instance of weechat running, even when we exit the session. This is useful as we can read previous IRC messages without losing context/history from disconnecting connection, or switching between different devices.

the basics

To start GNU Screen, enter the command screen into the terminal. Use Control + A followed by ? to open up the help screen. Here are other controls:

• Ctrl+a c Create a new window (with shell)
• Ctrl+a " List all window
• Ctrl+a 0 Switch to window 0 (by number )
• Ctrl+a A Rename the current window
• Ctrl+a S 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 the current and previous region
• Ctrl+a Q Close all regions but the current one
• Ctrl+a X Close the current region
• Ctrl+a Ctrl+d Detach the current session

restoring screen session

Anything done after typing screen can be safely closed by closing the terminal window or detaching the session. When reopening the SSH connection, you can quickly type in screen -r to re-enter the session. Multiple screen sessions can be viewed using screen -ls

last compiled: 2025-02-01 02:44:20.981508