On 3/4/11 12:15 AM, Dr. Ed Morbius wrote:
I do like the way gnome collapses the icons in the task bar when you have enough of them - and pops up the list so you can see it. It makes it easy to find the terminal session connected to some particular remote host.
WindowMaker has a windowlist. Even better. I usually last 1-4 hours when I periodically try GNOME. KDE and XFCE I might last a few days. Then it's back to the One True Window Manager.
I don't care about the mechanism so much as having everything I do on one screen, under one window manager. So all of my terminal sessions collapse in one place that becomes a popup list. Likewise all of my firefox windows (and for this reason I like separate windows better than tabs).
I'm really just fine with terminal windows and SSH-forwarded apps if those are necessary.
But why do you need screen, then?
Terminal multiplexing, session persistance, scrollback/logging, split screen (top running in the top panel, shell underneath, etc.), workflow organization (similar processes are grouped in a screen session).
But all of that just happens by itself in a GUI screen and isn't limited to text mode.
I'm writing this mail in mutt, in a screen session with multiple mailboxes open, each to its own screen window. It's like a multi-tabbed GNOME or KDE terminal, except that the session persists even if the controlling terminal is killed, or X dies altogether.
Yes, but you are limited to text mode apps. I actually have a GUI session that persists even if my local connection breaks. And it performs pretty well when I pick it up remotely. And I can't recall a time when the server side of the X connection ever died.
Screen is one of those amazingly powerful Linux tools, once you stumble across it.
But NX/freenx does the same and more. The only down side I can see is the time for the initial screen draw over a slow connection.