Talk:GNU Screen

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Contents 1 Axe what? 2 Kind of software 3 History? 4 GNU Screen?

[edit] Axe what?

The tutorial certainly does not belong in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a howto. But is the subject really noteworth enough, anyway? --Egil 19:59, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

A simple quickstart could be helpful and relevant. Not much point making this an entire manual, mind you- GNU didn't provide one. --MichaelSoulier 02:07, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

I removed the quickstart/tutorial section, the removed text can be found here. Quickstarts aren't included in articles like VNC or Mozilla Firefox, or in encyclopedias generally (wikipedia is not an instruction manual). Tutorials/quickstarts should be located in External links or Wikibooks (example: wikibooks:Programming), and at this point we have at least two external links that cover that info. I've left the {{cleanup}} tag because the numbered list should probably be converted to paragraph form to better suit the encyclopedia. --Interiot 11:54, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

While I agree that detailed manuals should be linked to (and not included), I see no reason for a minimal set of most-frequently used commands to appear in the article. See Emacs, bzip2, and many other articles on CLI-based programs. A good rule of thumb seems to be whether the how-to mainly serves to better the description of the topic at hand. Perhaps the old version was getting long and/or not serving that purpose. But certainly some amount of available commands would help the description. -- Karnesky 22:05, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

I second that. A minimalistic key of commands really helps convey the "flavor" of a program, which is part of an article upon its duties. --Maru (talk) Contribs 00:23, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

I'd prefer to leave it out, because I think that instructional material almost never belongs in an encyclopedia (except for things like regular expression where some syntax minutae is fairly central to understanding the topic). And Egil might have agreed (the tutorial section was still fairly small when s/he protested).

This isn't a programming language that needs to distinguish itself by syntactical flavor; it's a fairly unique program that's distinguished by its features. And I don't know that the bzip2 article is necessarily an ideal to move towards. But if we must include a minimal set of commands, the Emacs example isn't too bad, since it has a somewhat short (13 line) table that's visually distinct and therefore very easy to skip over if the reader wants to. --Interiot 07:02, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Kind of software

I have just changed where it said GNU Screen was open source, to free software, as this is more accurate. The GNU project makes free-software. -Josh

All Free software is open source software but not all open source software is Free software... --maru (talk) Contribs 05:52, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes but Free-Software is a subset of open-source. As it is a GNU project I think free-software is more accurate, anyway I'm sure there wouldn't be any disagreements about this. -Josh

[edit] History?

Anyone know how old screen is? I tried checking the changelogs, but they start at version 2.3, and don't include any dates. I've been an active user since the early 90s, but I think it's much older than that? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Marcusramberg (talk • contribs)

1987, according to the copyright & usenet post --Karnesky 18:05, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GNU Screen?

Why does the article refer to screen as "GNU Screen" and claim that it is "developed by the GNU Project"? It is listed as GNU software at http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/screen.html , but it's not called "GNU screen" even there (only a minority of the packages listed there have "GNU" in their names). The man page lists four authors and three copyright holders, all of whom are individuals (compare with e.g. groff, where the FSF holds the copyright).

(In case it's not clear, this is not an attack on GNU, the FSF or a certain hairy hacker – the wording just strikes me as misleading.)

JöG 19:39, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

It is called GNU screen on the project website and in many of the other links that are in this article. It also is pragmatic, as it makes article disambiguation easy. --Karnesky 03:57, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Is there any other common program called "screen"? If not, then there is no ambiguity in moving it to something like "screen (program)" or "screen (Unix)" or something like that, right? I know many people who refer to it as "screen" and I have almost never seen anyone who says "GNU screen". --Spoon! 21:41, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

The same arbitrary argument could be levied against GNU arch, GNU Aspell, GNU GRUB, GNU General Public License, GNU IceWeasel, etc. I'm not a fan of prepending "GNU" to F/OSS, but I see no reason to move the article when the project, itself, and many reviews/tutorials refer to it as "GNU screen" (particularly as we'd have to append something to disambiguate screen if the GNU was removed). How would "screen (program)" or "screen (Unix)" be better than "GNU screen?" --Karnesky —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 22:05, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, if "GNU screen" isn't its name, then "screen (Unix)" is clearly a better article name. And I doubt if [1] can really be called "the project website"; can the project members edit it?. But you are right; many of the links call it GNU Screen. Surprisingly, because like I said, the program itself and its documentation (man page, changelog, README ...) never uses any name other than "screen" or "Screen". JöG 22:09, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

"tmux" commonly refers to RFC 1692; there is a non-notable sourceforge project which has no wikipedia topic.

So? Why not including all terminal multiplexers? Even the unknown ones. Idd, I should make clear that it is not about the RFC. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.126.42.203 (talk) 21:10, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

There are several aspects: the topic for a particular program which appears to have been written a few months ago, having a few hundred hits via google (demonstrating that freshmeat.net is a good advertising media) shouldn't displace a more widely used sense of the word (17000/300). The program has no WP topic, hasn't established notability. This is not to say that there aren't a lot of WP topics written by developers to promote their school project. But it's outside the guidelines... Tedickey (talk) 21:56, 2 January 2008 (UTC)