What are useful .screenrc settings?

For those wanting a less cryptic way of getting a nice screen set up, I can heartily recommend byobu (formerly called screen profiles). It gives you a nice default set of stuff at the bottom of the screen – the bottom line contains various handy status information, and the second from bottom line contains a list of your screen windows. All this can be configured in a nice easy ncurses menu by pressing F9.

The function keys are mapped to common operations:

  • F2 – create a new window
  • F3 – Go to the prev window
  • F4 – Go to the next window
  • F5 – Reload profile
  • F6 – Detach from the session
  • F7 – Enter scrollback mode
  • F8 – View all keybindings
  • F9 – Configure screen-profiles
  • F12 – Lock this terminal

See this article for a tutorial and screenshots.

Byobu is in the ubuntu repositories from karmic (9.10) onwards. In jaunty it was called screen-profiles. Before that it can be installed from this ppa of from this download page. It’s widely packaged for other up-to-date distros aswell.

It does depend on python, but once you have byobu set up as you like it, you can have it generate a tar ball containing all you need to recreate your screen on another computer using byobu-export.

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