Re: [PATCH] Document how to tell git to not launch a pager

On Thu, 19 Jul 2007, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

I actually like screen as a way to keep connections around. But the whole multiplexing is wrong, wrong, wrong. It violates the "do one thing, and do it well" thing. It makes screen do two things, and do them really badly as a result.

So the "session" part makes sense. It's a worthy reason to use screen.

And the "window manager" part is kind of a funny hack, but let's face it, you can do better by using separate windows.

And the multiplexor could have been done (and historically _has_ been done) better, by not limiting it to terminal sessions.

But the *combination* of all three is just evil and stupid. And the choice of ctrl-A as the default command sequence (can you even override it? Don't know, don't care) is just insanity.

It's somewhat sad that screen has made some better projects not as successful.

 - multiplexing. I used better programs back in the 90's to multiplex 
   arbitrary sessions over a single terminal pipe (not just terminal 
   windows). I forget the name, because these days, everybody has real 
   networking, and you'd generally use ssh tunnelling for it and 
   ssh-agent. But screen was never very good at it.

 - "window manager". Quite frankly, I've never needed it. I doubt many 
   people do. graphical environments and virtual terminals are better. And 
   if you really want a virtual terminal on a single terminal, thinking 
   that it should be mixed up with all the other things screen does is 
   just nasty.

 - for session management and moving things around: I think this is the 
   main reason people still use screen. It's a worthy use, but I think 
   it's sad how it's mixed up with the bad features of screen. There was a 
   "detach" program (or something similar) at some point that did just 
   that part of screen. But screen is just widely enough spread that 
   people are used to it, and I don't think it went anywhere.

IOW, I think screen sucks because it tries to do totally independent things, and then mixes them up in nasty ways, and for historical reasons uses a bad break character too.

Oh, well.

			Linus