screen and curses(?) output

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 12:41:21PM -0700, paul beard wrote:
> I have discovered the joys of screen to manage processes between/across
> logins, but I have one small problem. If I run portupgrade and a dialog is
> displayed, I can't choose any of the displayed options. A tab will move
> through them but a space bar or arrow key is the same as hitting OK with no
> changes. is there some setting or different termcap I should use?

I've seen the same behavior with screen.

Try tmux instead of screen.  It doesn't have that problem in default
configuration.  It basically works the same as screen, for all the
common, simple operations, but you create a new session with either of:

  tmux new
  tmux new-session

. . . reattach to a detached session with either of:

  tmux a
  tmux attach-session

. . . and the command prefix character is ^B (instead of screen's ^A).
This means that the shell command character ^A (to bring you to the
beginning of the command line, just as ^E brings you to the end) actually
works in tmux, whereas it doesn't in GNU Screen.

Also . . . I first switched to tmux because it's:

  small on hard drive
  lighter on system resources
  distributed under the BSD license

. . . so if those things matter to you, you might consider the switch
(aside from the obvious fact that it solves your little problem with the
configuration dialogs during portupgrades).

I hope that helps.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ]
Marvin Minsky: ". . . anyone could learn Lisp in 1 day, except that if
they already knew Fortran, it would take 3 days."
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