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414 points st_goliath | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mmsc ◴[] No.43971967[source]
It's surprising that upstream was involved in this. Around 5 years ago, I came to the (sad) conclusion that GNU screen development had completely halted. Is that still not the case?

Does screen have the functionality to add a new window to an existing screen without attaching to the screen yet?

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immibis ◴[] No.43972604[source]
Open source does have a problem with inertia whenever one piece of software ends and another piece is created to replace it, but there's no immediate incentive to switch, because it is a switch, not an update.

Though conversely, when someone buys the trademark for an existing piece of software, and replaces it with something entirely different, like what happened with Audacity, that's also bad. So there's no good solution.

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Wowfunhappy ◴[] No.43972716[source]
Isn't this what distros are for? So e.g. Debian could decide to replace screen with tmux, possibly with some sort of compatibility package that takes all the same command line arguments as screen but uses tmux under the hood. (I've used screen very little and have never used tmux so I'm not sure if that would make sense in this context).
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kevin_thibedeau ◴[] No.43972924[source]
Tmux doesn't support serial ports.
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PhilipRoman ◴[] No.43973045{4}[source]
I'm not sure what made "screen" integrate the two separate pieces of functionality - you can use something minimal like "tio" for serial port access and it's much more elegant.
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1. kevin_thibedeau ◴[] No.43973413{5}[source]
It isn't separate functionality. Terminals connected via serial port is a valid use case for a terminal multiplexor.
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2. PhilipRoman ◴[] No.43973724[source]
In theory you're correct, but by that logic you'd also have to add ssh (probably by far the most common way of connecting to a remote terminal today). I guess you'd end up with something like mobaXTerm which is a valid approach for sure, but doesn't compose as well.

Personally I live by the maxim "if it can be separated without significant drawbacks, then it should be separate" but GNU tends to see it differently.

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3. throwaway173738 ◴[] No.43989062[source]
I dont think you understand what a terminal is. What you’re talking about is a shell running in a console. What we’re talking about is the terminal to connect to the console serial port running the shell.

EG https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220