I dunno if this is appropriate for this community, so mods, please delete if not.

I have been writing a screen clone in rust.

https://github.com/cameroncros/PoorMansScreen/tree/better_screen (The main branch is how I currently use it, not at all screen-like, the better_screen branch is much closer to a screen replacement.)

It all currently works fine, albeit quite simple, and I suspect not following best practices. Please talk shit about my code so I can fix that :D

For my next stage of development, I would like to use some combo of vt100 and ratatui to wrap the shell in a border, or add a menu bar at the top or bottom to make it clear when the user is inside a “screen”. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to go about doing that? I am very unskilled at ratatui.

  • @BB_C@programming.dev
    7•3 months ago

    If you’re serious about creating something good/better, you should use alacritty_terminal (not to be confused with the terminal app built on top of it) for low-level (from your PoV) terminal support.

    This is something zellij didn’t do. And now they have “basic functionality” bugs like this one open for years.

    I also wonder what made you pick screen as a baseline to improve on instead of tmux.

    • @CameronDev@programming.devOP
      4•3 months ago

      I’ll look into that, I’m currently just using cross term, which was enough to pass my rudimentary tests of nyancat. I’ll have to create some form of test suite to chuck various inputs at it and confirm it all works correctly.

      Its definitely not intended to replace screen or be better, that would require a lot more features and work that I just dont want to do. Its for fun/scratching an itch.

      I started it originally when I had issues with screen and permissions issues. The main branch is what I actually use, and I use it for running Minecraft servers. Its just an easy way to send commands to stdin of the process. (Stdout connected to regular stdout, stdin connected directly to a Unix socket).

      As for tmux, most I’m not that familiar with it, and used screen more.

    • @CameronDev@programming.devOP
      1•3 months ago

      Well, your point stands regarding alacritty_terminal, but right now, it actually works just fine for that test case:

      I suspect once I stop directing the raw input/output to the shell, it might become more important.

  • @dangling_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    8•3 months ago

    Screen is actually way more powerful than just opening a persistent session on the server side. It’s a terminal multiplexer, and you can use it to manage not only normal tty, but also USB serial! By replacing screen are you also going to recreate all the options like baud rate and /dev/ttyUSB0?

  • @livingcoder@programming.dev
    5•3 months ago

    I don’t know anything about screen. I think it would be great if you included a nice README.md file in the root of your repo for explaining what screen is and what your repo does both differently and the same. Please let me know if you do that. I’ll come and check out the repo at that point - kinda hard for me to want to jump directly into the code at the moment.

    • @CameronDev@programming.devOP
      6•3 months ago

      I had thought screen was pretty commonly known, but its a tool you can use to background and reconnect to a process, with the child process being completely separated from your shell. So you can ssh into a box, start a process with screen, and then logout, return later and reconnect. (It also does other stuff like read from serial consoles)

      Codewise, there isnt a lot there, 3 main files (main.rs, server.rs and client.rs) all weighing in at ~200 lines.

      It felt premature to add a readme at this stagr, as I dont see this as a complete thing yet, but I can add a readme later today.