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I really like the monitoring function in screen c-M and c-_ but whenever an event happens (or doesn't happen if c-_) on a screen I am monitoring the message doesn't go to the hard status line I have.

What I really want, yet have no idea how to do, is set it so when a monitoring event happens, the color of that screen changes. I think this is possible because my active screen is white and the inactive screens are green (on the hardstatusline).

To me, this would be really cool to implement....

EDIT: OK, I'm sure I can do this somehow. What I want is the color of the screen's name to change when activity stops for 30 seconds (or when activity starts, depending on what mode it's in. By default, an @ get placed in the before the name.


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2 Answers 2

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I don't think this is possible. When it comes to the listing of windows I see three ways to display them: Just %w , %-w %t %+w, and %W . The one that gives you the most control is %-w and %+w , which mean 'all windows before current' and 'all windows after current' -- respectively. I can't find anyway to customize them other to make it %-Lw and %+Lw which enable flags to be displayed. Although the status string does support conditionals with %? , that doesn't help in this case since the tab bar is mostly automatically generated.

You can however changed the formatting of the notification message with the activity command.

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Can't do this exactly (well, read on, perhaps you can), but how about having something like:

caption always

in your screenrc, then inside each screen you are running your monitoring program that based on its activity level sets its screen title using the string:


This will allow you to see the activity status in the caption line (perhaps used a fixed-width string such as '.....', 'X....', 'XXXXX'.

Perhaps somebody has enough .screenrc mojo to configure a caption line that is something like: 'show the window list, but display any windows with the title 'X' in a certain color (and perhaps 'XX' in another color). Or, only set a title on activity and only highlight a window when it has any title. I don't have quite enough mojo for that.

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