Not GP, but ~15 years ago tmux offered a lot better screen splitting options and a few other features that screen did not. That's why I switched. I did continue to use screen at work because it was ubiquitous, but then sysads started installing tmux as well and that was no longer an issue.

screen has improved a lot since then, but it lagged behind substantially for years.

Yes, this is exactly why I switched as well.

Also a benefit was actually being able to understand and edit my conf file without having to RTFM everything. Certainly not a reason to switch by itself, but a nice plus.

I was a very long time screen user and tried tmux early on in its existence. It was slow and different so I bailed back to screen. Last year I tried tmux again and have switched to it full time.

One of the things I like most about it is how easy it is to extend. In the role I was in last year, I'd have several long-lasting SSH sessions to various hosts. With a very simple bash script I was able to create a prompt in tmux that I could trigger to ask me where I wanted to ssh to. If I already had a connection to that host, it would switch me to that window, if not, it would create a new one and ssh to the host.

I wanted to do that in screen for years, but it just didn't have the features to facilitate it. On top of that I was able to easily re-map all of the keybindings to be just like screen for my muscle memory.

People say tmux is more powerful. Whatever that means?

Screen seems to cover all my needs and it learning it is easy. I came for the tabs (windows), sessions, copy and paste - but the must have for everyone is the scrollback buffer. You need it! Especially since we can scroll one the plain terminal.

> People say tmux is more powerful. Whatever that means?

I very rarely use screen/tmux nowadays, but as I recall tmux is a better fit for someone who wants to script their interaction. It makes it easy to send keys to other panes/windows in the session, and also to capture the content from other existing panes/windows.

Thanks. I don’t need that features but I see the use case for others.

It doesn't seem like screen has plugin support - while tmux has a fairly large plugin ecosystem.

> Having a modem is a pretty handy thing built into it.

in what way?

when I worked in the embedded software industry long ago, I spent lots and lots of time connecting over serial ports to dev boards, using software like Minicom. Being able to do that in screen itself would be neat. Tmux does it.

Screen does connect to serial ports. Just open the device and append the line parameters you want to run on the port. Unlike modem dialers like Minicom, you don't have to screw around with on-hook off-hook distinctions or an intrusive TUI.

Ha, I have only ever used screen for serial comms and only learned about Minicom from this thread

Exactly the other way around for me! I've been using screen since forever, and had no idea it could do that. Minicom I still know from the dialup dark ages.

When I worked with embedded systems, I used both, and didn't really understand the differences and nuances between them, and now I wish I did.

Connecting to serial devices. You can for example get a USB uart dongle, and then connect cables to some device where you have uart pins. Most recently I was doing something like that for an esp32 board, and used screen.

Ubuntu, and probably other distros, have screen as a hard dependency for doing upgrades to new release versions on the command line (do-release-upgrade command). I encountered it again just the other day while updating to an LTS version. It's a fantastic feature to have by default, in case your ssh connection gets dropped during the upgrade or something.