Screen is invaluable. The following documents some of the quick hacks I use to utilise screens full potential.

TERM Setting

Unix terminal programs depend on a reasonable $TERM variable being set. My specific issue is using emacs with windmove. I run emacs exclusively in the terminal, and windmove works as expected. However, running under screen breaks the use of the arrow keys.

Hitting shift-left results in `2D’ being sent to the terminal. There are a number of ways to fix this, the one the has the most consistent result (for me) is to correctly set the TERM variable. To do this I add an alias for screen.

alias screen="screen -T $TERM"

Now when ever I fire up screen it receives my current TERM and behaves as expected.

Command Key

The default command key is control-a which clashes with emacs as well as the shell in emacs mode. To change this, use the escape command in your .screenrc. I use control-\ as it does not clash with anything I use in emacs.

escape ^\\\

Visual Bell

I use the terminal bell with XTerm*bellIsUrgent: true to send notifications via my window manager (xmonad). Screens default behaviour is to use a visual bell, bypassing this setting. To turn the visual bell off (enabling the standard behaviour) just add the following to your .screenrc.

vbell off

Favourite Commands

There is a fairly large list of things that screen can do. However there are only three commands I run on a regular basis:

 $ # List all screen sessions
 $ screen -ls
 $
 $ # Detach and then re-attach to a screen session (creating it if necessary)
 $ screen -D -R screenname
 $
 $ # Attach to a screen session, in sharing mode, awesome for remote pairing.
 $ screen -x username/screenname