I use screen a lot at work, and I love it. It makes me feel somewhat like Rimmer when he’s doing the tests in Holoship.

I find it useful in two different scenarios:

• General development — having an emacs window, a python window and a bash window open at the same time is really handy, and I can flip between them like a ninja with C-A C-A.
• Running our development stack — Having a .screenrc with all the commands in to get a development stack up and running saves me time and means I don’t have to remember to start up every single process.

So I really wanted two .screenrc’s — one for general development, and one for running our development stack. I wrote this little bash script…

base="/home/$USER"
orig="$base/.screenrc"

#If no first arg, just run screen
if [ -z $1 ]
then
    echo "No arguments found. Using last profile..."
    screen
    exit
fi

#List available profiles if first arg is list
if [ "$1" == "list" ]
then
    echo "Available screen profiles..."
    cd "$base"
    options=`ls .screenrc.*`
    for opt in $options
    do
        ext=`echo "$opt"|awk -F . '{print $NF}'`
        if [ "${ext#${ext%?}}" != "~" ]
        then
            echo $ext
        fi
    done
    exit
fi

#Try to get the profile. If not found, run with given args
use="$orig.$1"
if [ -e "$use" ]
then
    echo "Using profile from $use..."
    cp -f "$use" "$orig"
    shift
    screen "$@"
    exit
else
    echo "Profile not found at $use. Using last profile..."
    screen "$@"
    exit
fi

If you add this to your .bashrc:

alias screen="/path/to/above/script"

, you now have the capability to run multiple screen profiles at your will. For example, I have the following at ~/.screenrc.main:

startup_message off
vbell off
altscreen on

screen -t Emacs 0 emacs -nw

… and at ~/.screenrc.stack:

startup_message off
vbell off
altscreen on

screen -t Emacs 0 emacs -nw
screen -t Python 1 python
screen -t Bash 2 bash

Then I can do the following…

Runs screen with the ~/.screenrc.main profile.

screen main

Runs screen with the ~/.screenrc.stack profile.

screen stack

Runs screen with the last used profile, with the -U option enabled

screen -U

You can pass args as normal, as long as the profile is the first argument

screen main -U

Lists your available profiles and exits.

screen list