Collecting my attempts to improve at tech, art, and life

elscreen

Tags: emacs elscreen tools

I use ElScreen every time I open Emacs. May as well make a quick note about it.

attachments/img/2017/cover-2017-01-11.png

I admit it. I’m still more of a Vim user. The workflow I’m used to is Vim with some tabs, usually sitting in a tmux session. When in Emacs I use ElScreen, which basically gives me tmux inside Emacs.

If you know what that means, great. If not, then pretend ElScreen is a weird way to make emacs a tabbed editor.

Install It

ErgoEmacs has a nice guide to using the Emacs package manager. With that as your guide, find and install the elscreen package from MELPA.

Start ElScreen in your init file.

(elscreen-start)

Now the elscreen commands are available throughout your Emacs session.

Use It

ElScreen Usage shows many commands for ElScreen. I manage with just a few.

Function Keys Description
elscreen-create Ctrl+z c Create a new screen and switch to it.
elscreen-next Ctrl+z n Cycle to the next screen
elscreen-previous Ctrl+z p Cycle to the previous screen
elscreen-kill Ctrl+z k Kill the current screen
elscreen-help Ctrl+z ? Show ElScreen key bindings

I know. A tutorial or something would be nice. But every time I start to write a tutorial for something, I think of one more detail that hasn’t been covered and the cycle starts all over again on the new detail. Just needed something here so I could shut my brain up about “why don’t you mention ElScreen?”


Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-01