elscreen

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

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?”