[screen-devel] new ideas for screen

[Edward Peschko]

hey all,

I'm *very* glad that screen seems to have risen from the dead; it's
one of my favorite tools by far and has saved me tons of time over the
years.

However, there are a couple of features that I think would make it a
lot more useful, and I was wondering how feasible it would be to
implement them:

1. Named buffers. right now, there is only one buffer in vim. I'd like
to have 26 - one per letter.  As for key binding, perhaps C-a <esc>
<return> to get into copy mode (as usual), and when done, press
<C-a>;;<letter>  (ie: <C-a>;;a to get into buffer a, <C-a>;;b in
buffer b, etc). As for pasting, use semicolon to access the correct
buffer, and paste it, ie: <C-a>;<letter> to paste.

This would be incredibly helpful, more times than I could count.

2. Cross search in buffers. Be able to toggle it on and off so that
<C-a>/ searches not only the current buffer but *all* buffers.

3. redefinable 'master' control character (<C-a>). On occasion, I've
had the need for embedding screens within screens (for large
administration jobs on lots of machines). But the control characters
get in the way of each other. It would be very helpful to be able to
define the main control character so that I could be able to send
screen commands to both 'master' and 'slave' commands.

Anyways, I've been out of screen development for a while, so I'm not
sure how much of this has been already suggested and/or programmed,
but I'd be interested to find out..

Ed