I spend my days in screen, emacs, irssi, and various Mozilla apps. I’m pretty happy, but one that that drives me crazy is that C-a (i.e., CTRL+a) is “go to the start of the line” in emacs, and also how you invoke screen commands. So running emacs in screen means you lose C-a.
Not any longer. My current build and analysis cycle is close to an hour, so I have time to do things lower down on my TODO list, like read the man page for screen:
C-a C-a (other) Toggle to the window displayed previously. Note that this binding defaults to the command character typed twice, unless overridden. For instance, if you use the option “-e]x”, this command becomes “]]”.
C-a a (meta) Send the command character (C-a) to window. See escape command.
Happy day! Ted says he can’t believe I don’t know this, but it’s one of a million things I have yet to learn.
3 Comments
Thanks God for your post. I’ve spent almost half an hour trying to figure out what to do with C-a. When I read the screen manual I thought, “Bah, I’m never going to need C-a” so I forgot completely about it, now that I’m switching from vim to emacs-nox, it’s a completely different story.
lol screen
Start screen with -e^pp, or put “escape ^pp” in your .screenrc, and then the screen command keystroke will be C-p instead of C-a. (Replace ‘p’ with whatever key you want.)