putty + screen = meant to be

Edit: This post was relevant when I was yet to discover the very amazing tmux.For me, screen seems like a distant memory now.tmuxinator FTW!

I am getting used to the screen command for my Linux development environment and I find it to be a great tool for detaching and reattaching sessions - but that's just scratching the surface from what I see on the net. As there are many useful posts out there explaining why screen is something that you've been missing if you are working via putty, I will let them do the talking.

Introduction

A redhat magazine post

I am a newbie to screen and this is all that I have been doing:

1. Open multiple putty sessions via Putty connection manager
2. Foreach tabbed session I do a: $ screen -S session_name
3. Code
4. While leaving for the day, disconnect all sessions - I don't "exit"
5. When I want to come back again - I open the tabs once again and reattach to previous session - I normally name my sessions "tab1", "tab2", etc. so reattaching is equivalent to: $screen -d -r tab1
   

All this is good enough. I had just one rant while using screen - I did not know how to scroll back. Say I run a find command and the output spews out to more than 80 lines - the size of my terminal window. If I am running in screen mode - by default I can scroll back only upto 100 lines. And then, this post came to my rescue:

screen scrollback solution

Not only does it give a scroll back solution, it also showed a really cool trick - you can actually do a vi type '/' and '?' search on the output of your shell till now - now that's something. Also while you are at it - do check out:

Putty connection manager + screen post

Let me hear you screen!.