Compiling screen from CVS on OSX for vertical split.

June 6, 2008

Screen in an amazing tool. The latest version from CVS adds an amazing feature to allow you to split screens vertically (previously you could only split horizontally), which is extremely nice if you have a widescreen monitor. The only problem is that the patch isn’t yet included in MacPorts or Fink for this feature.

Here’s how to fetch it from source, patch it and build it yourself on OSX (tested on 10.5.3). First we need to check out the source:

shell> cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/screen co screen

Next, we need to manually apply the patches from MacPorts (assuming you’ve used MacPorts before). First change into the screen directory and apply the following 3 patches:

shell> cd screen/src
shell> patch < /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/
release/ports/sysutils/screen/files/patch-maxargs
shell> patch < /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/
release/ports/sysutils/screen/files/patch-windowsize
shell> patch < /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/
release/ports/sysutils/screen/files/patch-pty.c

(Each of those should be on one line, I had to split them up to make the wrapping better).

Now, configure using the same method as the macports:

shell> ./configure --enable-locale --enable-telnet --enable-colors256 --enable-rxct_osc

From there, you should be able to do a make and make install to get your screen up and running. Vertical-split is bound to ctrl+a – |  (control-a and pipe) (substitute whatever your bind key is for ctrl+a). Then you can use ctrl+a – :resize <x> to resize the window, where <x> is x%, -x, +x or x. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

8 Comments to "Compiling screen from CVS on OSX for vertical split."

  1. E wrote:

    Works perfectly even 6 months later :)

  2. snc wrote:

    I just looked and saw that the screen available in MacPorts has the patch “wrp_vertical_split”

  3. Lee wrote:

    @snc, Awesome, I’m glad to see they added that :)

  4. Carlos E. López wrote:

    Worked on OS 10.6

    :]

    Thanks

  5. Per Wiklander wrote:

    Or try tmux http://tmux.sourceforge.net/, available in MacPorts as well.

  6. Donovan wrote:

    I couldn’t get this to work on 10.6. I also tried looking in macports and did “sudo port install screen” and that worked fine, but no vertical split?

  7. Patching GNU Screen with vertical split support in OS X - Evan Meagher wrote:

    […] window splitting. A bit of Googling revealed that this is a common problem and I zeroed in on a Mac-centric solution before finding that the specified windowsize patch doesn’t […]

  8. What's a good substitute for gnome terminal? wrote:

    […] screen that comes with Mac OS X does not come with this feature, I built it from CVS according to directions I found on this blog. I assume you could do the same for Linux by skipping the patch steps. Answered by […]

 
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