[ngangaga]

[flagged]

[JdeBP]

It's a combination of factors:

* The original author of the project has not been involved in it since 1990. The people who took it over and made it a GNU project then largely stopped working on it in 2004. The people who are now working on it are something like its 3rd or 4th wave of developers.

* Learning the internals of screen now from scratch is a lot harder than when I did it in 1987. There's an awful lot more operating system historical and portability factors, now. In 1987, it was works-on-4.3BSD-might-not-on-your-Unix.

* If you deal with pseudo-terminals cross-platform, there are still huge variations on how pseudo-terminals work and how the long-standing security issues of pseudo-terminals, identified in the 1990s, have been addressed in operating systems.

* screen is encumbered by a lot of 1980s Think. It still today diligently manages, and puts quite a lot of effort into constructing, a generated-on-the-fly TERMCAP environment variable, for example.

* Attitudes to security have changed. At least one security hole in the headlined report was actually a neat-o feature of terminals in Unix in the 1970s and 1980s.

[entropie]

For me it felt (!) like screen is pretty much obsolute since 10+ years. When tmux came I switched and never looked back and I know a few that handled it the same.

[DrillShopper]

Try as I might I cannot get my fingers to re-learn the tmux keybindings. The GNU Screen keybindings are that burned into my brain.

[cozzyd]

Screen is useful when you need to a nest multiplexing inside tmux.

And for serial ports

[dbdoskey]

A similar process is happening with zellij and tmux. Since I switched over I feel that tmux is obsolete.

[noosphr]

Screens main use case is to open an emacs session remotely.

Tmux's main use case is to be glue for a unix IDE.

The two use cases are rather different and the tools are very specialized for them.

[guappa]

On my sistems screen doesn't have setuid.

[rixed]

Same here (speaking more specifically about debian)

[bombcar]

On my gentoo box it's setgid hmmm.

Ubuntu it's not set.

[90s_dev]

Nostalgia and novelty are powerful narcotics.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Engineers are rational people. Software developers calling themselves "engineers" are not.

[esseph]

IDK Man the hammer I use today looks a hell of a lot like the hammer used by engineers throughout human history.

[mardifoufs]

Is it actually in common usage? I'm sure it's used by a lot of people, but it seems quite niche still.

[wkat4242]

It's used a lot for legacy reasons I think. People didn't move to something newer like tmux because why would they? It's super handy to keep stuff running on a console while disconnected from it. In that sense it (or at least, tools like it) are indispensable.

[esseph]

Sysadmin types, often daily

[wkat4242]

True, it's not really as if it's a massive codebase

[UI_at_80x24]

We usually wait for a version written in Rust for this kind of cruft removal.

[nine_k]

The problems here are more about the architecture. You can write 100% memory-safe but completely insecure code in Rust, Java. Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, bash, you name it. For instance, running a setuid binary may add problems to code written in any language.