My Development Environment, Part 1: GNU Screen

In ~/.screenrc:<p><pre><code> altscreen on </code></pre> enables alternate screen, which is disabled by default, but is normally enabled in most terminals. It's the thing which prevents less, vi, etc. from clobbering the screen contents and leaving their gunk behind after exiting.<p>(A Google search seems to indicate that some people dislike this feature, but I found screen unusable until I discovered this option.)

Prediction: part 2 is vim and part 3 is about his pimped up bash prompt that shows the current Git branch. Or something like that.

Here's the mandatory "if you're using GNU Screen check out tmux" comment.<p>Really though, check it out. The main thing I like better in tmux is that it does both horizontal and vertical split terminal windows in a way that seems much more intuitive to me than screen.

This is absolutely uncanny. I've just started writing a similar blog post thread about my dev environment, and its similar to yours (i.e. screen (I'm moving to tmux though), vim, bash, etc.).

I really wish there was a nice way to run nested screens, I like having screen run locally, but I always want to be able to easily attach and detach from screen sessions on my server. I know I can escape them with keyboard shortcuts, but its confusing and I have never managed to get used to it, so I generally do server screen sessions in a seperate terminal

Thanks for a solution to the problem of missing bright/bold colors that I found in your .screenrc. This issue hadn't bothered me much, otherwise I'd have researched it before, but it's nice to have it fixed anyway.<p>For reference, the option is question is<p><pre><code> attrcolor b ".I"</code></pre>

Great post. Jon Druse created a Ruby gem recently that does something very similar -- but more project-oriented rather than global ~/.screenrc:<p><a href="http://github.com/jondruse/screeninator" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/jondruse/screeninator</a>