GNU/screen is one of those applications so immensely useful I seriously wonder how I’d function without it. This post isn’t a tutorial (see here for that), I’m just documenting a particular aspect of my configuration for personal reference as much as anything else.

I use alot of tabs in screen, usually on a per-host and per-task basis. It’s handy therefore to have a proper statusline informing me which host I’m on, or which task is current. As the former changes often I have a couple of bash functions that include the appropriate escape to set the name in screen:

# Set hostname in hardstatus line in screen
if [ "$TERM" == "screen" ]; then
function ssh() {
echo -n -e “\033k$1\033\134″
/usr/bin/ssh $@
echo -n -e “\033k`hostname -s`\033\134″
}

function telnet() {
echo -n -e “\033k$1\033\134″
/usr/bin/telnet $@
echo -n -e “\033k`hostname -s`\033\134″
}

# We’re on localhost
echo -e “\033k`hostname -s`\033\134″
fi

So here’s what it ends up looking like with a few different sessions on the go, with each of the screen names having been set depending on where I’ve ssh’d to. My actual .screenrc is here - there’s not much to it, and it’s mainly bits that have been pinched from elsewhere, such as the hardstatus formatting. One thing worth noting though is that the escape I use for screen is now ‘\’ as opposed to Ctrl-A, this saves a bit of typing on my behalf.