Hey,

not sure what happened, but either you must have accidentally done something wrong or I need better steps, as for me it seems to work just fine.

After I do 'ls -la' and then run 'mc' output of ls still stays in view, all with one line config (altscreen on).


(...)
-rw-r--r-- 1 amade amade    2674 04-09 11:26 winmsgbuf.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 amade amade   24088 04-09 11:27 winmsgbuf.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 amade amade    3386 04-09 11:26 winmsgcond.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 amade amade    1525 04-09 11:26 winmsgcond.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 amade amade    8416 04-09 11:27 winmsgcond.o
amade@pecet ~/workdir/gnu/screen/src $ mc

amade@pecet ~/workdir/gnu/screen/src $

So did some more thinking and applied better fix.
Available in both screen-v4 and master branches.
Will be in next release.

Thanks, now described bugs disappeared.
But now appeared that tmux bug I just described as "be careful not to introduce". I will try to repeat it simpler.

• Start screen (with altscreen on)
• Type into it: "for ((I = 1; I <= 100; ++I)) { echo $I; }; mc" and press Enter
• Make the terminal (for example, gnome-terminal) 3 (or more) lines smaller vertically
• f10 (or esc 0) (exit from mc)

Now I see:

86
87
88
89
90
  2017-01-10 04:04:05  ~$
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100


And I expected to see:

99
100
  2015-07-09 19:38:32 ~$ _

(All described behavior happens in "normal" terminal such as gnome-terminal and not in "dumb" terminal such as linux console)

Run screen, then run mc in it, then exit from mc. You will see this:

[ Lot of empty space ]
$ _

So, all previous commands and their output moved up (to scrollback) and now they are accessible using ctrl-a esc only. What should be instead? Instead terminal should come to state in which it was before mc startup. I. e. all output should be here. I should see this:

$ mc

$ _

I. e. I should see "mc" command I used to run mc, then one empty line and the current line with cursor. I. e. I should see same that happen without screen involved. tmux has no this bug.

Okey, now let me say about next bug. Open screen, then open mc inside it. Then resize your outer terminal (this will cause resizing of screen, of course). Then exit from mc, type ctrl-a esc and type pgup several times. You will see that your scrollback contains a lot of copies of mc (with different sizes). This is wrong. Scrollback should contain same text it contained before starting of mc. Again, tmux has no this bug.

But when fixing this bug be careful not to introduce yet another bug. tmux has bug:

• Start tmux
• Type into it: "for ((I = 1; I <= 100; ++I)) { echo $I; }; mc" and press Enter
• Ctrl-b " (tell tmux to open new pane, this will make mc smaller)
• Ctrl-b ; (tell tmux to switch to top pane, i. e. to mc)
• f10 (or esc 0) (exit from mc)

Now I see:

82
83

34  2015-07-09 19:38:32  ~$ _

And I expected to see:

99
100

34  2015-07-09 19:38:32  ~$ _

So, tmux "eats" numbers 84..100.
So, tmux has this bug and screen has not. When you fix bugs described at the beginning of this report, be careful not to introduce this tmux's bug I described here.

$ screen --version
Screen version 4.04.00 (GNU) 19-Jun-16