Using Emacs within a GNU Screen session

My text editor of choice is Emacs, and it is once of the applications that I automatically launch inside a tab within GNU Screen. One problem, however, is that GNU Screen by default captures Control S (C-s) because this key combo means XOFF (stop sending input to terminal; to re-enable sending input to terminal, press C-q). This is undesirable behavior because C-s is a very important key combo in Emacs.

You can manually turn off flow control in Screen by invoking

C-a :flow off

within the tab running Emacs. I wanted to do this through a script, however, so I added the highlighted line to a bash script that launches Screen and creates several tabs:

# launch a GNU Screen session named 'netbook' in detached mode
screen -AdmS netbook -t SHELL
# create separate tabs in session 'netbook' and launch programs in tabs
screen -S netbook -X screen -t HTOP htop
screen -S netbook -X screen -t CMUS cmus
screen -S netbook -X screen -t IRSSI irssi
screen -S netbook -X screen -t EMACS env TERM=xterm-256color emacs 

# On tab 0, launch SpiderOakONE and dropboxd daemons for cli
screen -S netbook -p 0 -X stuff "cd $HOME/bin^M"
screen -S netbook -p 0 -X stuff "./tty_startup.sh^M"
# turn off flow control in tab 4 so C-s is passed to emacs
screen -S netbook -p 4 -X 'flow off'


Although the highlighted line doesn't generate a syntax error, it actually has no effect! When press C-a f (Control a, f) within the Screen tab running Emacs, I noticed that flow control was actually not being disabled in the GNU Screen tab running Emacs, despite the highlighted command above.

Fortunately, Screen has an automatic flow control mode that is smart enough to figure out when to disable flow control, for example when Emacs is running. To enable it, add the following line to your .screenrc config file:

defflow auto

Now I don't experience any more problems with Screen capturing the C-s key combo.


References:

https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/html_node/Flow-Control-Summary.html

https://bitbucket.org/gojun077/bin-scripts/src/cef6f0a31c087cad85246f494f82a5abea2d0990/screen_netbook.sh?at=d257&fileviewer=file-view-default My GNU Screen launch script

https://github.com/gojun077/jun-dotfiles/blob/master/screenrc My .screenrc file from my personal dotfiles repo