Resizing with GNU Screen

I know a lot of you use screen frequently. My friend Chris gave me a tip recently related to resizing split windows in a screen session.

In screen, you can do <C-a>:resize [+-]N<CR> to resize a window +/- N lines

This is handy if you've got a cmd running and want to see when it's done. You can split the screen, load it in one window, and resize it to be small; thereby, preventing it from occupying valuable real estate on your monitor.

Screen has a handful of : commands such as :number N to change the numeric position of the current window. Take a look at the DEFAULT KEY BINDINGS section of man(1) screen for the the full list (parenthesized next to each key binding).

For more screen tips, check out the screen extravaganza posted back in 2008.

Mouse Tips

This has been mentioned on the blog in the past, but readers email me about it often enough that it deserves a formal tip. You can use the mouse to resize windows in Vim if you set your mouse as follows.

:set mouse=a

This will even work over a remote ssh session if you also set your term appropriately.

:set term=[the appropriate setting]

Options for term settings are as follows:

in the GUI: "builtin_gui"
on Amiga: "amiga"
on BeOS: "beos-ansi"
on Mac: "mac-ansi"
on MiNT: "vt52"
on MS-DOS: "pcterm"
on OS/2: "os2ansi"
on Unix: "ansi"
on VMS: "ansi"
on Win 32: "win32"

If the mouse setting interferes with your operating system's copy and paste ability such as the select to copy feature under X windows, you can revert to the standard behavior by holding shift while selecting text.

Setting your mouse as described also prevents accidental terminal scrolling with the mouse wheel when editing a file remotely and causes Vim to scroll within the current buffer instead.

Thanks to mmmattos for emailing me and providing the motivation for this tip.

Diffing From Inside Vim

To compare two files without resorting to launching vidiff from the command-line, you can do the following.

1) open one of the two files in a standard buffer
2) type in :vert diffsplit filename

Put the name of the file you'll be comparing in place of filename. Prefixing the command with vert gives you a vertical split. If you'd prefer a horizontal split, simply omit the vert.