Gnu Screen - split screens

18 Mar 2012

One of the features I’ve always wished Gnu screen had was the ability to split a screen horizontally, so you can for example run a grep or mc in the top half of the terminal, and some commands in the bottom half.

Well it turns out that you can split screens in Screen, here’s how to you do it:

• C-a S to split

• C-a X to unsplit (and remove the current region)

• C-a Q to make the current region the only region

Also, you can bind some keys to move between regions; add these settings to your ~/.screenrc:

bind j focus down
bind k focus up
bind t focus top
bind b focus bottom

Then you can do things like C-a j to move down a region,** C-a k** to move up a region.