Re: [screen-devel] [bug #57551] man page says C-a \ to quit, but C-a C-\ is what actually does quit

[Britton Kerin]

On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 4:18 PM Jürgen Weigert <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Technically the man page is correct, when speaking about the screen binary 
> itself.
> The man page does not know that we ship a default /etc/screenrc that removes 
> the CTRL-A CTRL-\ binding,

For me C-a C-\ *does* quit, it's C-a \ that doesn't.  I suspect I'm on
a 4.02.01 vintage /etc/screenrc though, because the 4.7 install I did
to ~/opt/screen-4.7.0 does not appear to honor the --sysconfdir=DIR
configure option even though ./configure --help says:

...
--sysconfdir=DIR        read-only single-machine data [PREFIX/etc]
...

or at least it doesn't install any file called screenrc or etcscreenrc
anywhere under ~/opt/screen-4.7.0.  That seems like a (different) bug.

I'll try to check in the next day or two the behavior with the
etcscreenrc installed in /etc

>
> The section for the quit command actually gives a good reason to remove that 
> binding.
>
> I'd suggest to drop CTRL-A CTRL-\ from the binary and simplify the man page 
> and the default /etc/screenrc accordingly.

In my use of screen (communication over serial with microcontrollers)
I use quit constantly, so it would be nice if some binding was
available and well documented.

Really if the shipping screenrc that everyone (i.e. distributions)
uses is going to undo or change the bindings the man page should
somehow reflect that reality, rather than a theoretical behavior that
barely exists in practice.

Britton