* Smylers <smyl...@stripey.com> [2009-04-29 15:35]: > in less time than it would've taken to read the relevant parts > of screen's manpage I learnt of, installed, read the complete > docs for, and started using dtach.
The problem with screen is tries to do detaching *and* window management, and for the latter *also* has to do terminal emulation. What makes dtach good is that it sticks to one of those and does them decently. All of the programs I want to detach from are curses apps anyway which do not need a buffered terminal emulator to persist their display state. When I started using dtach I was irritated by the need to specify the path of its socket explicitly, but that was because I was used to how screen makes it an implementation detail to hide from the user -- instead, you get to name your screen sessions so you can tell them apart. I've since discovered that if I don't insist on putting the sockets in my home directory, the socket serves as a useful session identifier and the filesystem provides a natural namespace for those identifiers. Basically GNU screen layers *WAY* too much unrelated magic for my purposes on top of the case I actually wanted it for. Start with a mistaken premise and you go off the design choice deep end. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
