Jon, Chris, and I saw the Foo Fighters and Serj Tankian (singer from System of a Down) at MSG tonight. Amazing show. The crowd was not really what I had expected. The three of us *started* the mosh pit. Me. Starting a mosh pit. Ridiculous. But it happened tonight. Many times.

By the end, we [met | had physical contact with] a nice group of guys, and one crazy girl, who felt the same we did.

Sadly, no good concert injuries to speak of. I banged up my knee and elbow a bit, and Chris drew a little blood, but nothing like the guy who broke his leg. By standing there. We had nothing to do with it. Honest.

Sleep.

Photo credit: Dave - Foo Fighters by gajbireland. Licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

A person on screen-devel, who shall respectfully remain nameless since he didn’t post to the list proper, sent me this in response to my proposed patch:

I would never use this feature because I would rather that window #n
always remain window #n, but I can see the usefulness of the feature
if you used to have more than 10 windows and now have fewer than 10
but some windows still bear numbers greater than 9, so you can go
back to using Ctrl-A to switch to them quickly.

My recommendation is that you call it compacting, not renumbering.
“renumber” doesn’t make it clear enough HOW they get new numbers.

To which I replied:

Thanks for the mail. Your comments are fair enough and definitely anticipated. I often can peak way above 10 windows, begrudgingly, and often want to migrate down to as few as possible so that the next window allocated is the highest available number. And, I’m an active user of the hardstatus line, including labeling windows. I implemented this because I know several people who use screen like I do, though knowing many people do not.

I do like your suggestion that the patch feature be called “compacting.” I was in fact struggling with how do best describe the action, and that does, in a single word. I will create a new patch sometime in the next week reflecting this, even just for my purposes.

I’m curious, though, for my own usage: how do you remember which window is which? What is your typical screen workflow?

Thanks,
Eric

From this week’s “The Look Book” in New York Magazine (yes, again):

What do you do?
I knew you were going to ask that, but I’m weird about being associated with what I do. We all label people based on that, so what I do is, I’m a human living life, just like you are.

But how do you pay rent?
Vocationally, I’m a fashion stylist and an artist and I’m multifaceted. And then I also work at Jeffrey in their women’s designer section. I’m in a space with four walls and other people, and it’s been very challenging to wrap my brain around that.

(Emphasis mine).

I’ve been thinking along similar lines. Pretty sweet.

After running a single session of screen for a long time, I often find that I have several gaps in the numerical ordering of windows. Using :number is definitely feasible, but it takes a bit more effort than I’d care to contribute every time I want to make my windows contiguously numbered.

I’ve created a patch against CVS HEAD to fill in the holes of the window numbering. It simply moves windows to lower positions until there are no holes left. Any [constructive] comments are welcome.

The patch can be found here. It was also sent to the screen-devel mailing list.