[screen-devel] Patch that provides labels functionality

[Janos Barbero]

Hi,

Here's a very small patch against HEAD that provides window labels
where window numbers are currently displayed. The patch consists of a
labels command, tweaks to display functions to display label instead
of number, and a change to WindowByName to let windows be selected by
label or title.

This is most useful if you have more than 10 windows and want to
switch to them with something better than C-a ' 10 <RET>. By default,
the patch does nothing, but if you add something like this to your
.screenrc:

labels         "0123456789qwertyuiosfghjzvbmQERTYUIOPDGHJKLZCVBM"
bind q select q
bind w select w
...
bind M select M

then you can switch to window 11 via "C-a w" for example.

If there are more windows than labels, it simply displays the window
number instead of the window label.

Debug and info messages are not affected. I originally wrote this
patch for screen-4.0.2 in 2007 and in that version I did go through
all the info messages and change the sprintf("...%d...", p->w_number)
calls to sprintf("...%s...", p->w_label) but I figured it was simpler
to submit this patch without doing so. I only just got around to
updating the patch for screen HEAD, but better late than never...

Please let me know if there are any other changes I should make to the
patch so it can be included. A couple of possible improvements that I
could work on are:
- Automatically update the bindkeys from the labels as long as the key
isn't already bound
- Update debug and info messages to display window label instead of number
- Update window list to show label, number, and title

Thanks,
Janos

screen-labels.patch
Description: Binary data