screen 5.0.1-1 is now available in Cygwin as a TEST release. This release
fixes several security and other bugs in the previous release. See the release
announcement[1] for details.

screen configuration has changed somewhat in version 5, as described below. By
testing this release you can get a start on that. Please report any problems
or successes with this release to the cygwin list ([email protected]).


# Changes in screen version 5

## Bugs

* The "source" command in .screenrc makes screen hang on start[2]. If you have
  "source" in your .screenrc, you'll need to work around that for now by
  removing it and copying in the sourced configuration instead.

* "login off" and "deflogin off" don't seem to work, so screen creates a login
session for each window. Note that this doesn't really do much. You can see 
  the list of logged-in sessions with the "w" command, but it doesn't 
  automatically make them login shells.

* There are other reported bugs[3] which might affect Cygwin, although I
  haven't found that they do yet.


## Configuration changes

* Color escape codes have changed, seemingly arbitrarily. This is an obscure
  part of screen configuration, but if you use it, for example to get colored
  text in the caption line, be sure to read about "String Escapes" in the 
  screen man page or info. For example to get bold green text on a black 
  background, in screen v4 I used

      %{.kG}

  but in v5 this becomes

      %{b2;0}

  Obviously.


## Behavior changes

* Some terminal attributes have changed. In screen v4 I used

      term screen-256color

  but in mintty I now get better results by not setting this, which results in
a default terminal of screen.xterm-256color.


# About screen

Screen is a full-screen terminal window manager that multiplexes a physical
terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. You can
switch between windows, create new windows with other programs in them, kill
the current window, view a list of the active windows, turn output logging on 
and off, copy text between windows, and view scrollback history. Programs
continue to run when the screen session is detached from the terminal, so you 
can log in again later and continue working.


Andrew E. Schulman

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/screen-users/2025-05/msg00005.html
[2] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?67008
[3] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=screen
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