Gnu Screen theme cycle with keybinding

Question

A guy at work did this and shared with me, so i thought I'd continue spreadin the love.    If you have multiple gnu screen sessions going at once, wouldn't it be nice to visually tell them apart without spending time to read the session name of each or trying to see what was going on within each?   
The best way would be to color code the caption and hardlinestatus lines and be able to easily select a "color" per screen session and that's what he and I did.  Using C-g, we/you can easily cycle through various "themes".   This could also be useful if you wanted to cycle through mutiple hardstatus lines that displayed different information too if that's the route you'd like to go.   Anyways here it goes:
#terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b ".I"
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm'
# erase background with current bg color
defbce "on"
startup_message off
bindkey ^G screen screen_theme.sh
caption always "%{= KW}%-w%{= gW}%n %t%{-}%+w %-="
hardstatus alwayslastline "%{= kW} %-= %{= kG}Session:%u%{= kW} %5` | %{= kG}Host:%{= kW} %H | %{= kG} MEM:%{= kW} %2`MB |%{= kG} SW: %{= kW}%3`MB | %{= kG}Unread: %{= kW} %4` | %m/%d %C %A"
vbell off
#Backticks to display information in status bar
backtick 1 60 60 $HOME/bin/get_uptime
backtick 2 60 60 $HOME/bin/get_freemem
backtick 3 60 60 $HOME/bin/get_freeswap
backtick 4 60 60 $HOME/bin/get_gmail
backtick 5 60 60 $HOME/bin/get_sessionname
defscrollback 5000
screen -t root 0 sudo -s
screen -t shell 1 bash
screen -t shell 2 bash
screen -t shell 3 bash 
screen -t shell 4 bash
screen -t shell 5 bash   
screen -t shell 6  bash 
screen -t shell 7  bash 
screen -M  -t irc 8 irssi
screen -t home 9 ssh home
select 1
This script resides in ~/bin which is in my path.  screen_theme.sh:
#!/bin/bash
INDEXFILE="$HOME/bin/themes/theme_index"
# if this is the first time then set
# the index to 0
if [[ ! -e $INDEXFILE ]]
then
echo 0 > $INDEXFILE
fi
THEMENO=`cat $INDEXFILE`
THEMEMAX=5
if [[ $THEMENO -eq $THEMEMAX ]]
then
THEMENO=0
else
THEMENO=`expr $THEMENO + 1`
fi
echo $THEMENO > $INDEXFILE
THEMEFILE=$HOME/bin/themes/theme${THEMENO}
if [[ -e $THEMEFILE ]]
then
bash $THEMEFILE $STY
else
# reset the index back to zero if broken
echo 0 > $INDEXFILE
fi
then I created a directory ~/bin/themes.  Within that directory I have the following files:
$ ls themes/
theme0 theme1 theme2 theme3 theme4 theme5 theme_index
Each theme file is another color theme, the index just holds a count of the number of themes.
An example of theme0  ( remember when doing yours to escape your backticks, otherwise it'll break).
#!/bin/bash
# yellow
SESSION=$1
screen -S $SESSION -X caption always "%{= KW}%-w%{= yk}%n %t%{-}%+w %-="
screen -S $SESSION -X hardstatus alwayslastline "%{= kW} %-= %{= ky}Session: %u%{= kW}%5\` | %{= ky}Host:%{= kW} %H | %{= ky} MEM:%{= kW} %2\`MB |%{= ky} SW: %{= kW}%3\`MB | %{= ky}Unread: %{= kW}%4\` | %m/%d %c"
Here's how my screen started:
http://tuxtraining.com/images/screen1.png
After C-g
http://tuxtraining.com/images/screen2.png
After C-g again
http://tuxtraining.com/images/screen3.png
and so on.
Last edited by scv5 (2009-10-12 16:38:51)

Answer 1

thayer wrote:
steve___ wrote:
Lich wrote:... useless for most of us as we only use one screen session normally.
How do you know this?
Just a guess, but doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of a multiplexer?  I mean it's like running 20 instances of firefox instead of using a single firefox window with 20 tabs.  I'm sure some folks prefer the former, but I think it's safe to say the majority use the latter method.
Sort of, I find screen becomes difficult to manage once we're talking more than the original 0-9 windows and you have to C-a-##, there's also the issue of screenspace.  With firefox i can list my tabs vertically giving me a lot more room to manage my tabs, screen doesn't have that option, so they go horizontally.    If i name all my tabs after the IP or name of the machine theiy are logged into, approach 15-20 windows really creaps on the screenspace.
So typically what i do is have four shells open (grouped together or done in something like terminotor, or tabbed in flux or pekwm) each with 0-9 shells a piece, each session organized into type of servers.   So the upper left may be the email systems i support, the uppser right screen session may hold all the shell of our public facing web environment, bottom left is my local box, bottom right being misc boxes (dns servers, nis/ldap servers, various developement boxes..)  you get the hint.
take into consideration i get one of these going per monitor that gives me approximately 80 shells, which is quite unmanagable in one screen session if you ask me.