Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

“If you wanna echo, echo, don’t talk.” [Dirty Harry the Geek]

— seen on an anonymous (to protect the guilty) CVS commit message

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 13:39:41 +0300 From: Muli Ben-Yehuda User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040803i To: Marc’s List Subject: tip: changing the default screen(1) command character

Or “how to make screen not use C-a by default”.

It’s pretty simple really, once you grovel through the documentation enough to find the relevant bit. Set it with either -e command line switch or the ‘defescape’ or ‘escape’ commands.

Explanation: screen(1) is a very useful utility for everyone who works a lot on remote computers. It allows you to attach and detach from remote sessions (detach like nohup(1), but you can also attach back to it) so that they continue running while you’re disconnected from that machine. screen by default ‘steals’ the C-a (Control a) key stroke to itself, which is incredibly annoying if you’re used to the default readline key strokes in bash, emacs, BitchC, etc, where you type it to go to the beginning of the line. Ergo, the tip above to change it to something saner.

Cheers, Muli
—
Muli Ben-Yehuda
http://www.mulix.org | http://mulix.livejournal.com/