A version of screen that supports vertical splitting (Shortcut key Ctrl+A |), ready for building on OS X (all Apple patches pre-applied)
Why use this version of screen?
- Because the one installed by default on OS X is really old, and doesn't support vertical splitting
- Vertical splitting is a killer feature that you desperately need
- You're on a Mac by necessity or choice, and you want to use screen with vertical splits, but don't want to mess with installing the Apple patches required for building on OS X
- Because building and installing your own software is cool
Note: This requires developer tools to be installed in order to build successfully. You might need to brew install automake if you're still missing autoreconf for some reason
The following commands will download, build, and install screen into /usr/local/bin/screen. Note that this does not replace the default screen which is located in /usr/bin/. Make sure to read the section on "Post installation" below in order to use the newly installed screen instead of the old one.
Separate steps:
git clone https://github.com/FreedomBen/screen-for-OSX.git
cd screen-for-OSX
./install.sh
All in one command:
git clone https://github.com/FreedomBen/screen-for-OSX.git && cd screen-for-OSX && ./install.sh
In order to run the new version of screen after it is installed (instead of the default old one), you will either need to reference it by full path (recommended) or rearrange your PATH variable so /usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin so the new binary is found first (not recommended as it may have unintended side effects).
I recommend creating an alias in your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc that simply points screen to the new version. This will allow you to still reference screen with "screen" but refer to the binary by its full path:
echo 'alias screen="/usr/local/bin/screen"' >> ~/.bash_profile
If you don't care about the old version of screen, you can also replace it with the new binary:
sudo cp /usr/local/bin/screen /usr/bin/screen
These are the things I did to this that make it vary from what you would get if you downloaded the official screen source code:
- Applied all of the Apple patches for
screen - Downloaded and included the required Apple header file vproc_priv.h into the repo so it matches the source here. Note: This file is not usually included with distributions of screen because its license (Apple Apache) is incompatible with the GPLv3
- Added an install script to make the build and install process easier
Building this software requires the Xcode development tools, but these no longer include automake and autoconf, which are dependencies. Instead of using Homebrew, we can build these tools from source easily enough. See https://superuser.com/a/897316
curl -O -L http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/autoconf/autoconf-2.69.tar.gz
tar -xzf autoconf-2.69.tar.gz
cd autoconf-*
./configure
make
sudo make install
autoconf --version
curl -O -L http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/automake/automake-1.15.tar.gz
tar -xzf automake-1.15.tar.gz
cd automake-*
./configure
make
sudo make install
automake --version