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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.



Instead, it's doomed to rot until it's replaced of rewritten.

I've seen how that mindset has ruined several companies. Not saying that you're wrong about that particular program that is, after all, free software replaced by other free software parts. But for business, it's lethal.

Joel Spolsky had a nice piece about it:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

That and Fire and Motion seem to be forgotten wisdom already:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

I feel old :-)


It's not large:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/screen.git/tree/src

A few 2kLOC files and the rest is rather small.


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.


> 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 guess, but does it really get in the way?

I use tmux only for scrollback and having multiple "tabs" and sessions, and not much else. But the more advanced stuff like splits and whatnot never really get in my way.


Along the lines of Mosh, I've migrated from it to Eternal Terminal (ET): https://eternalterminal.dev


If that is literally the only thing that you need, dtach is the ticket.


Even screen is too powerful for that use case. Just use nohup or dtach instead.


Screen has some obscure functionality that tmux doesn't have. Handling serial port connections, whereas with tmux AFAIK you'd have to use minicom.


Tmux


If there was a way to get rid of Tmux's persistent status bar, I'd be happy to switch over. But last time I checked, you can't, and I want that real estate.


Add "set -g status" to your tmux.conf. You can even bind it to a key to toggle if you want.




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