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out of time

• 29 April 2011, 10:51

  Screentopia!

  I’m a big fan of GNU Screen. Split-screen is indispensable for writing code, and it’s convenient to be able to run a bunch of interactive processes and switch between them really easily (control-A [0-9]). I like screen, so much, that I never want to use a terminal emulator without it.

  So, to that end, I generally set up gnome-terminal to execute screen at startup. That way, when I exit my last screen window, the whole terminal exits, which is what I want. This generally works quite well, but one problem I’ve had is that, if I use screen to open a non-shell process (e.g. vim), it doesn’t carry the environment variables set in my .bashrc over. This makes sense when you think about what is going on:

  • gnome-terminal starts
  • gnome-terminal spawns a screen process
  • screen spawns a bash process, which inhabits window 0
  • From that bash process, I type screen vim ., which causes screen to spawn a vim process.

  Thus, the process ancestry for vim is: vim > screen > gnome-terminal. At no point is there a bash in there to load the .bashrc and set up the environment.

  I played with a few different solutions, but finally came up with a pretty simple one. Here are the steps.

  • Create a .bash_env file in your home directory. Move your environment variable declarations to there.
  • Add the line . ~/.bash_env to your .bashrc
  • Create the following script startscreen somewhere (I keep my personal scripts in ~/.local/bin):

  #! /bin/bash
  
  . ~/.bash_env
  screen

  • Make your startscreen script executable.
  • Set your gnome-terminal custom command to ~/.local/bin/startscreen (or wherever you put it).

  And you’re set!

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