The more I use the terminal, the less I see a need for tmux, screen, byobu, etc. Today I use a double wide screen to solve the side-by-side issue and normal terminal tabs for multiple jobs and Ctrl-Z for things I need running.

I liked that solution of yours with jobs instead of termux. Being a command line junkie myself (or rather, a REFORMED command line junkie) I am ashamed to say I never tried that, I would always stuck with tmux and I never liked the experience. I disliked having to learn the keystrokes to do things, I also faced the same problems as you with the names of each pane (they would all say 'bash'), and in a virtual terminal without fbdev (as happens in BSD based systems and ones where I didn't remember to compile the relevant drivers) that little bar at the bottom takes precious screen real estate.

Anyway, if I get back to the old habits, I'll try using that. I had managed to do do most things without ever going into ncurses, including text editing! Personally, I like that environment a lot more than Emacs. I don't care what they say about virtual terminals being old and obsolete, at least they are streamlined to work with text nicely. I only ever regret they not being able to support UTF-8, for which I am bound to really try with emacs.

Say, I'm out of the loop regarding new technologies, I don't expect you to be any different, but are there any good emacs replacements being developed lately?

Also, I am sorry I haven't been around to reply to other posts, my head just hasn't been quite there lately.

> I liked that solution of yours with jobs instead of
> termux. Being a command line junkie myself (or rather,
> a REFORMED command line junkie) I am ashamed to say
> I never tried that, I would always stuck with tmux
> and I never liked the experience. I disliked having to
> learn the keystrokes to do things, I also faced the same
> problems as you with the names of each pane (they would
> all say 'bash'), and in a virtual terminal without fbdev
> (as happens in BSD based systems and ones where I didn't
> remember to compile the relevant drivers) that little bar
> at the bottom takes precious screen real estate.

I wound up loving tmux, but of course at some point began wondering if there might be a simpler way to cover the vast majority of my use cases with an even thinner keystroke interface layer that *also* somehow solved my forgetting what window/pane something in particular was running. The older I get, the more "out of sight, out of mind" torments me....

FWIW, I tweaked PROMPT_COMMAND a bit more, prepending its value with "clear;":

export PROMPT_COMMAND='clear;echo "=== jobs ===";jobs'

so that the jobs output always winds up in the top-left of the screen, which saves me time for being able to count on that output always been in the same place, but of course there's always at least a small inconvenience, namely the last line always showing that "clear" is "Done":

=== jobs ===
[1]   Stopped                 digg  (wd: ~)
[3]   Stopped                 usenet  (wd: ~/News)
[5]-  Stopped                 mp
[6]   Stopped                 weblist x
[7]   Stopped                 gopher
[8]   Stopped                 cl
[9]+  Stopped                 vic z
[10]   Done                    clear

So I'll just have to see if that annoyance ends up out-weighing what the "clear" accomplishes.

> Also, I am sorry I haven't been around to reply to other
> posts, my head just hasn't been quite there lately.

:-)

maybe try `jobs | head -n -1`

also, analog watches are the best, as is anything that doesn't have a processor

> maybe try `jobs | head -n -1`

Thanks.

Actually, I gave up on setting PROMPT_COMMAND as I soon realized I don't want to be seeing a jobs list before every bash prompt because it becomes cumbersome in and around simple commands that aren't "apps", so to speak, e.g. "date", "ls", etc.

So I wrote this Lua script currently called 'jobs-filter' to present "jobs" output more to my liking:

#! /usr/bin/env lua
for line in io.stdin:lines() do
  local num,x,cmd = string.match(line, '^%[(.-)%](.)%s+%S+%s-(%S.-)$')
  print('%' .. num .. x .. ' ' .. cmd)
end

then created these bash aliases:

alias f="jobs|jobs-filter"
alias j="jobs|jobs-filter"

(two, because I want to learn which I prefer over time... or maybe keep both...?)

so that, now, a simple 'f' or 'j' leads to the likes:

%1- digg  (wd: ~)
%3  usenet  (wd: ~/News)
%5+ mp
%6  weblist x
%7  gopher
%8  cl

which will help me remember I need to preface job numbers with '%' to foreground them.

> also, analog watches are the best, as is anything that
> doesn't have a processor

Sounds like *someone* needs a sun dial for their birthday....

Sounds like *someone* needs a sun dial for their birthday....

Hey, I would actually love to have a sundial. As a matter of fact, I have long wanted to make one. I know it's not particularly hard, I just don't know how to work the materials I need to do it.

A sundial would look very nice out in my yard, it would help me give the whole place this sort of "stone-age" look that I would like it to have. I would be very pleased if my house looked like one from The Flinstones.

Thank you for the reminder that I need to go fetch some more rocks. I have been meaning to make a stone "igloo" of sorts, but I am afraid if I don't do it well it will end up collapsing.... with me and my wife inside.