Using screen: Monitoring

For some programs it's not needed that you stay to watch every line of text it shows. On unix, most programs don't even show text until something happens.

To take advantage of this fact, screen has two functions. The first is monitoring for inactivity.

Inactivity is when a program doesn't do anything for a certain amount of time. It can be used to show when a compile is ready, but you don't want to wait or check. Monitoring for silence can be started or stopped by pressing C-a _.

The other function is monitoring for activity. This is problably useful for tail-ing log messages. With the key combination C-a M, you can start or stop the monitoring. Whenever there is activity on the window, it will be shown in the status line when you're on another window.