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Is there a way in screen to turn off the status bar? Ideally, only display it when I have 2+ tabs open? What .screenrc entries would accomplish this?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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There are a couple of ways you can get a "status bar" that I can think of:

One status bar is the caption. It normally only appears with multiple windows (split screen), this setting is caption splitonly. The always-there version is caption always. It doesn't seem to have a way to tie it to the number of screens ("tabs") open. If it goes away by hitting your command character (^a) and typing :caption splitonly then that was what you're looking at, and putting caption splitonly in your .screenrc will get rid of it.

The other status bar is the hardstatus which refers to the terminal's "hardware status" line. This one usually gets displayed in the title bar of your window, but it could be forced to the bottom of the terminal with the setting hardstatus alwayslastline. Setting hardstatus off turns it off. This is always either "on" or "off".

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    sweet! "caption splitonly" is exactly what I wanted. Knowing about the vim-style <escape-key> + ":caption splitonly" was bonus, too.
    – Aaron F.
    Dec 15, 2010 at 6:16
  • It looks like you can't disable it entirely.. .which is a shame as I wanted to be able to split screen two dialog boxes on a tiny LCD... the wasted line for the caption is unacceptable unfortunately.
    – cb88
    Aug 11, 2016 at 14:55
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The setting to turn off the hardstatus line is called ignore. The off setting doesn't do what one would expect it to do, the manual says:

If the flag is set to ‘off’, these messages are overlaid in reverse video mode at the display line.

I have this in my .screenrc, which seems to do what you need:

hardstatus ignore
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  • Hi Bert! Welcome to Server Fault. Thanks for adding this answer. When quoting someone it is good to add a link to the source.
    – chicks
    Dec 16, 2016 at 14:20
  • Didn't work either there's still a line saying "[freebsd][ 0$ bash 1-$ bash 2$ bash 3$ bash (4*$ bash) ][01/22/22 12:56 AM]" at the bottom of my screen
    – hd1
    Jan 22, 2022 at 0:56
  • If you already have "hardstatus ignore" and "caption splitonly" as suggested in the other reply, I would not know what could cause this, sorry. You may want to have a look at your systemwide screenrc for clues (on FreeBSD, that seems to be /usr/local/etc/screenrc).
    – BertD
    Jan 24, 2022 at 17:31

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