GNU screen: output that causes the screen to scroll leaves garbage at the bottom of the window

Question

I'm configuring GNU screen in a cygwin environment. Re-configuring actually--it always just worked before, and when I upgraded to cygwin-64 the same config files give me unexpected behavior.

What happens is that whenever I do something in the terminal that overflows a full screen the terminal does not scroll. Instead, each new line "overwrites" the last one on the bottom row of the window. Even when the process is through, if I CTRL+l, there's a bunch of garbage left on the last three lines of the terminal. Also, when I use a program that takes up the entire screen, such as vim or irssi, the "caption" line disappears.

I suspect that there's some discrepancy between my xterm settings and screen's 'term' setting, but I'm a little at sea here and, as I said, all the same configuration files worked fine (and do work fine on other machines--both cygwin and native linux). Can anyone recommend a way to get my beloved screen to behave again?

Here's my .screenrc:

shell /bin/bash

screen -t bash 0

select 0

escape ^Zz # Instead of Control-a, make the escape/command character be Control-z

autodetach on # Autodetach session on hangup instead of terminating screen completely

startup_message off # Turn off the splash screen

defscrollback 30000 # Use a 30000-line scrollback buffer

nethack on

# Misc h4x to make scrollback work
terminfo * te@:ti@
termcapinfo xterm|xterms|xs|rxvt ti=\E7\E[?47l

# Bells are annoying
bell_msg ''
vbell off

caption always '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B} %d/%m %{W}%c %{g}]'

Answer 1

I'm answering my own question here because, while @Keith Thompson's answer does resolve the symptom of the problem, it didn't keep the symptom from occurring. He did set me on the right path, which was to install the xterm package in cygwin-64. That appears to have resolved the issue.

Answer 2

You're running screen under xterm (something I do all the time myself). The screen process "knows" how big the terminal is, but that information can be out of sync with reality. I find this happens a lot when I run screen -dr from a different window.

Resizing the xterm windows causes it to send a SIGWINCH signal to the process running under it, which typically causes that process to re-query the tty settings.

Click the maximize button twice. If you're already maximized, that will restore it to a normal window and then re-maximize it; if it's not already maximized, it will do the opposite. In either case, it should cause screen to recompute the window size.

Answer 3

I encountered the same problem today. Thank everyone for the heads-up. The final solution I found out is that to set the mintty term type to: vt220. There must be something not right about the "xterm". After that, everything is good.

Answer 4

I downgraded screen version to Screen version 4.02.01 (GNU) 28-Apr-14 and it worked.