Switch to last window in GNU Screen

Question

I know how to list out the available windows in Screen using C-a " and/or C-a ', but how do you specify that you want to go to the very last screen without having to explicitly say so.

Like what I'm looking for is something like this:

C-a L

NOTE: I'm just asking whether screen supports this natively or if I'll have to write a bit of script in order to get this to work, also, tips and pointers for writing said script, if proved necessary, would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Assuming you have a window 0 (i.e., you haven't closed it), you can do

C-a 0

(select 0) followed by

C-a <backspace>

(prev), which switches to the previous window; if you're on the first window, it wraps around to the last.

The prev command has several other default key bindings:

C-a h
C-a p
C-a C-p

Answer 2

If you create a new windows with Ctrl+a c screen switches to the newly created last window. (If that isn't what you were looking for then:

screen -Q select $(screen -S $STY -Q windows|sed 's/ \([[:digit:]]*-*\**\)\$/\n\1/g'|tail -n1|cut -d: -f1|sed 's/[^[:digit:]]//g')

will "Switch to last window in GNU Screen" from within any screen window.)

Alternatively (without depending on $STY, and presuming that you want the first or only screen session in screen -ls) you can use:

screen -S $(screen -ls|grep '^\s'|awk '{print $1}'|head -n1) -Q select $(screen -Q windows|sed 's/\([[:digit:]]*-*\**\)\$*\!*/\n\1/g'|grep '[[:digit:]]'|tail -n1|sed 's/[^[:digit:]]//g')

If this is something that you often need you can add:

_stslw_fn(){ screen -Q select $(screen -Q windows|sed 's/\([[:digit:]]*\)[^ ]*/\n\1/g'|tail -n1);};alias stslw="_stslw_fn"

to the end of ~/.bash_aliases to create the stslw (switch to screen's last window) command.