Putty, Screen, Finch
I’ve recently been introduced to the program “screen”. It allows you to open mulitple terminal sessions once you are logged into a machine. It’s similar to the idea of having multiple tabs in a Firefox browser. You only need to open one xterm/putty/ssh session, run screen, and you have multiple (excuse the direct reference) screens through a single login.
Why would I want to do this? Convenience and also safeguarding.
Convenience: While working from my Windows machine I used to open multiple putty windows for multi-tasking on my server, but this now allows me to open as many command line session as I need without cluttering up Winows’s task bar. It’s also incredibly quick to have a fresh screen without even touching the mouse.
Safeguarding: Residential high-speed internet is great, but far from 100% reliable. If you loose your internet connection while working on a file or running a compile, it is a huge pain to get your sessions back up and running. If you were running your commands from within screen, all you have to do is log back in and re-connect to your screen session. All of your work is sitting there as if you never left. This also is fantastic if you have a session started from one machine and have to move to a different one and pickup where you left off. Brilliant!
I ran into a small hiccup using Finch from within a screen session. This may only apply to users running Finch within a screen session while logged into a server with PuTTy.
Symptoms: Finch runs great before you invoke screen. The textual graphics/borders render properly. Once you run screen and launch Finch within, the graphics/borders become a bunch of annoying characters instead.
Solution: This one is done completely from PuTTy. In your running session click the upper leftPuTTy icon and select “Change settings…”. Navigate to Window -> translation and select UTF-8 from the drop down. Click Apply. Then from your screen window force a refresh/redraw by hitting Ctrl-A and the L. You should now see a properly rendered Finch.