Multiple security issues in GNU Screen

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?

Upstream requested that the SUSE team take a look at it. It seems that development is understaffed and the upstream may not have the expertise to maintain it properly. Which, if true, is sad -- I know that tmux and others exist, but a lot of people have used Screen for many many years. It sucks when a tool bitrots.

Looks like a tech-debt ridden large piece of software that new developers just can't understand.

If that's the case, it's not really about it being "understaffed". Instead, it's doomed to rot until it's replaced of rewritten. There's no scenario where more maintainers will help, except for marginally delaying it.

The good news is that there are almost perfect replacements out there, and most of them are leaner.

What are the replacement tools I should be looking at as a casual user of screen?

If you want screen-but-better: tmux.

If you want a rethinking of the idea: zellij.

I prefer the latter. It matches my mental model of such things, and lots of people talk about enjoying switching to it. Many others happily use the former daily.

tmux is great but it's way too powerful for the 90% use case of screen - which is "let this process continue to run even if I disconnect or logout".

I've had some luck with mosh, but that also seems kind of moribund.

https://mosh.org

For my use case it's fine.