Ryan Williams.org

Updating GNU/Screen

I use gnu/screen a lot on various Linux machines and like to have 256 colours when running Vim. Unfortunately the build that comes with OS X doesn’t support this so I had to go ahead and build it myself. It’s pretty straight forward.

First thing you’ll need is a terminal client that can actually handle 256 colours. The standard Apple Terminal.app doesn’t. I recommend giving iTerm a try. It also has xterm mouse support.

The next thing to do is compile and install the latest version of gnu/screen. I’ll assume you already have Git installed.

git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/screen.git
cd screen/src
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-colors256 --with-sys-screenrc=/etc/screenrc
make   # I got a lot of warnings here, but they don't seem to matter
sudo make install
sudo cp etc/etcscreenrc /etc/screenrc

If everything went to plan you can run screen and should see “+color-256” in the welcome message. To properly test things you can download 256colors2.pl and run that in the terminal. It will draw all 256 colours to the terminal.

Supporting Vim

If you run vim it will complain about the lack of a 256 colour terminal. This is just because the $TERM environment variable is “screen” instead of “screen-256color”. You can set this manually or you can make screen do it for you. To get screen to do it for you simply edit your ~/.screenrc file and add:

term "screen-256color"

You may also want to enable xterm title support. This means your current vim document name will appear in the iTerm tab. For this add the following to your ~/.screenrc:

termcapinfo xterm*|rxvt*|kterm*|Eterm* 'hs:ts=\E]0;:fs=\007:ds=\E]0;\007'

If you find that the xterm titling still doesn’t work in Vim, then you may need to add this to your ~/.vimrc. Note the special characters ^[ and ^G need to be entered using CTRL+v, ESC for ^[ and CTRL+v, CTRL+g for ^G. Don’t enter them literally.

set t_ts=^[]0;
set t_fs=^G
set title

The final test to make sure everything works is to run screen then run vim. The title in your iTerm tab should say “[No Name] – VIM”.