Forums

1) GNU screen. I'm surprised no one else has asked for this. 2) It would also be nice if I could run chsh to make zsh my default shell, or if not, maybe someone could tweak my login settings to make this happen.

Hey there, thanks for the suggestions.

I'm a screen user myself, and we've looked into it in the past -- unfortunately it's not entirely straightforward to implement.

What we've tended to think is -- two of the main uses of screen are to provide a persistent session, and a way to share a single session from multiple terminals (or users). Since our browser-based console sessions already persist and are accessible from multiple browsers simultaneously, and since we have a web-based UI for console sharing, maybe we already have most of what screen can offer.

So, what did you want screen for? What sort of workflow are we talking about?

re: default shells, you're welcome to edit your .bashrc to make it run zsh...

The benefit for me of screen on PythonAnywhere would be multiple 'windows' within one console session. I use a .zshrc that auto-creates labelled windows for editing, documentation, logging, running a command along with a menu bar at the bottom that reminds me which windows are open and what their number is.

Good idea to run zsh from .bashrc.

Ok, I see.

We use PythonAnywhere to develop PythonAnywhere, and the pattern we tend to use is to have several different consoles open in different tabs - one for Git/VCS, one for watching logs, one for each server we need to SSH into, one for Editing/Vim, etc... Then you can shift between them using tabs, or different windows if required... Alt+Tab or Ctrl+PgUP / Ctrl PgDown are pretty much in muscle memory now...

I'm wondering if that sort of way of working could work for you? Admittedly we can't handle auto-labelling of windows (but we might be able to hook into some vt100 control codes some day!), but other than that I think most of the functionality is there.

There are some of the other advantages of screen too -- if you restart your PC or your browser and it remembers its tabs, it will re-open all of those console sessions which will be just the way you left them... You can also re-open them all on a different PC by going to your Dashboard...

All right. Maybe someday you could allow us to rename a console in the Dashboard, plus have its name appear in the browser tab similarly to how in gnome-terminal the running command name can appear in the titlebar of the tab.