URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68640>
Summary: Needless config compatibility break causes much user
trouble
Group: GNU Screen
Submitter: mirabilos
Submitted: Sun 23 Aug 2026 11:31:25 PM UTC
Category: Feature Request
Severity: 3 - Normal
Priority: 5 - Normal
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Unlocked
Release: 5.0.2
Fixed Release: None
Planned Release: None
Work Required: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Sun 23 Aug 2026 11:31:25 PM UTC By: Thorsten Glaser <mirabilos>
There’s lots of requests from users why their hardstatus colours no longer
work. I’ve personally lost hours trying to remote-debug that, thinking an OS
upgrade of someone I help shot termcap/terminfo or the terminal emulator
changed or whatever, until the user got pointed to GNU screen 5.x needlessly
REMOVING support for the colour codes from 4.x (and, to add insult to injury,
marking it as “deprecated”. Deprecating something means “please stop
using it in the next years, it MIGHT eventually go away, or it does not work
as you think it does”, not “it is already removed”).
Many, many people maintain their custom screenrc, and with tmux no longer
being FOSS due to acceptance of AI slop, the continued existence of GNU screen
is more important than ever.
So, please add back support for the old colour codes, so that peoples’
screenrc can work with both 4.x and 5.x releases again. For example, I’m
personally going to be using screen 4.x on various OSes’ stable releases for
the next *nine* years (4.0.3 and newer), and only very occasionally
encountering a 5.x, and maintaining two separate files is an unacceptably
bothersome hassle in that case.
The old and new syntacēs don’t even conflict, ffs…
I’m not even sure *when* it was dropped (the 5.0.0 release notes certainly
do not document this), but even having a major version jump does not mean you
HAVE to break users’ use cases like Python3 does even in patchlevels and
even PHP has begun doing… 🤬
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