Re: Caption string: Escape status

[Ben Love]

> > I'm looking for a way to have a visual cue (preferrably in the status
> > line) to know when the escape sequence (C-a) has been pressed.  This
> > would be particularly useful when nesting screen sessions.  I've
> > looked through the man page for the string escapes sequences but
> > haven't found anything that does something similar.
> > 
> > I've considered creating a patch to add a new string escape sequence
> > that would return the state of the escape (similar in function to %F).
> > But first I wanted to make sure that this wasn't already possible
> > through some other means.
> 
> The patch in #27713 might work for this (I haven't tried it). I don't
> believe there is any other way/trick.
> 
> For nesting screen sessions, I think a better solution is to just use
> different escape keys. Are there other use-cases where such notification
> can be useful? (as I have stated before, I am trying to avoid adding
> kludge to hardstatus/caption unless there's a compelling enough reason
> to do so).

In my scenario I'm often reconnecting to nest screens.  Since one
session may, at different times, be one, two, or three levels deep, it
would be difficult to use different escape keys, unless I could change
the escape key on the fly.

Another time this would be useful is when you are not certain the
sequence has been pushed.  I have often lost the first few characters of
a line because I forgot to exit copy mode or the like.  In my mind, this
is most of the justification for the %P status.

But even those particular use-cases aside, I think the patch is not a
kludge because there's simply no other way to do it.  If I could query
the screen process for the state from a shell, I could accomplish it
with backticks.  (Although that presents its own problems with
latency.)  As others have said, I think a way to visualize the status
(or any way to indicate the status!) would be very helpful.

Ben

-- 
Ben Love
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