I am excited about the upcoming 5.0 release of GNU Screen, so I built it from git (commit 4c788308) to help with bug testing. Here's my report after using it heavily for a couple of days:
Most things work fine. In particular, I have been able to use the two new features that I am most excited about: bracketed paste mode and true color support. Both of them work great! I only found two usability issues so far: 1. As others have pointed out, the terminal locking rewrite is confusing. I could not find a way to disable this feature. Is this documented somewhere? I think many users will get tripped up when they upgrade. 2. There is a subtle change in behavior when you renumber a window to move it to a different number and what Screen considers to be the current window. Here's how you can reproduce issue 2: 1. Start a new Screen session. 2. Type something in the first window that is created automatically to make it distinguishable from the other window we will create next. I typed a shell comment: "# This is window 0". 3. Create a new window with C-A c and type something distinguishable there, e.g., "# This is window 1". 4. Type C-A : to enter command mode. 5. Enter the command "number 0" to move the current window from 1 to 0. Consequently, the window previously at 0 will now be moved to 1. 6. Press C-A " to go to window list mode. This is where there is a change in behavior: In v4.9, the current window selection follows the window to its new slot. So, since window 1 was the current window in step 3, when that window is moved to slot 0 in step 5, slot 0 will become the current window. With v5.0/git, this doesn't happen anymore: after step 6, window 1 is shown as the current window. This is surprising: After step 5, you are still in the window that says "# This is window 1," which has now been moved to slot 0. But when the window list is shown in step 6, it indicates that you were in window 1 instead, which is now the window that says "# This is window 0." In other words, the sequence C-A " followed by pressing enter immediately takes you to a different window. I think this is a bug: when you press C-A ", the window that you were previously in should be the one shown as the current window in the window list.
