$ cat screen-bug-bell-freeze

# The bell-freeze which drives me bats
screen -X bash -c 'sleep 2; while :; do echo -ne \\a; sleep 6; done'
screen -X bash -c 'while :; do sleep 0.25; date; done'

$ screen -c screen-bug-bell-freeze

=================

What happens: `date` output stumps down the screen for a while, pauses for several geological ages while the status line announces Bell in window 0', then continues.

What I'd like to happen: 'Bell in window 0' appears in the status line for just as long (5 seconds) -- but does not at all impede the flow of output on that window.

I understand that this might be somewhat miserable to implement on a physical terminal with weak capabilities (might have to erase the status line, scroll, redraw status line -- repeatedly; and this might look horrible; if anyone were actually using old physical terminals at old slow baud rates where the redrawing would be noticeable).  It should be fine on a physical terminal with an actual status line, scrolling regions, or insert-line capability.  In fact I'd be OK with an implementation which retained the existing 5-second-freeze behavior on physical terminals where it'd be a hassle to do better...

This appears to be controlled by :msgwait == MsgWait in the source, and presumably applies to everything sent down the MakeStatus() pipeline (which appears to have various entry points like Msg(), LMsg()); so improving this would make life better all over the place.

Thanks!