6/11/2026 at 9:50:46 PM
You've obviously written this because screen wasn't doing the right thing, but your readme only explains that it's a "young project, not a drop-in GNU screen replacement". What are its advantages over screen or tmux?by stereo
6/11/2026 at 10:03:35 PM
Fair. Adding a section for this now.screen actually works the same way architecturally: it parses all output through its own built-in terminal emulator and redraws from that state on reattach. But that emulator is decades old and lags far behind what modern programs emit. Whatever it doesn't understand gets dropped or mangled on redraw. boo swaps that layer for libghostty-vt, Ghostty's VT core, so the saved state matches what your terminal would actually display, and terminal queries get answered while detached so TUIs don't hang unattended.
tmux is great, it was just never the model I wanted. I really liked screen's simplicity, sessions and a prefix key and nothing else to learn, and boo keeps exactly that.
by kylecarbs
6/11/2026 at 10:23:36 PM
can you share more on the tmux model vs boo?by dgnemo
6/12/2026 at 12:22:36 AM
Tmux is n clients to 1 server.Screen is 1 server to 1 client.
In screen each client session is a fork of the screen server. In tmux there's one server and many client forks iirc.
by drzaiusx11
6/12/2026 at 12:28:53 AM
this is incorrect. you can have multiple clients using screen -x instead of screen -aby gguingff
6/12/2026 at 12:55:57 AM
I didn't say you couldn't have multiple clients, I said clients and servers are the same process forked. Or did someone add distinct client/server support to screen finally? I know theres a lot of stuff bolted onto screen over the years but I wasn't aware they dropped forked servers for the tmux model...by drzaiusx11
6/12/2026 at 2:08:18 AM
Did a bit of digging; the first client gets forked to create the "server". The forked server then detaches and runs in the background. You're right that -x creates an entirely new, separate client process, unrelated to the OG client or the forked server.Without -x though it works as originally described.
Edit: gnu screen 1.0 was originally released in 1987. The -x flag was released in screen 3.0 in the 90s. TIL
by drzaiusx11
6/11/2026 at 10:36:24 PM
I want boo to be a screen replacement, not a tmux replacement. tmux gives you a whole workspace: layout, scrollback, copy mode, a status bar. screen's appeal was that it did almost none of that: sessions, a prefix key, done. boo keeps that model and swaps the emulation for libghostty so reattach actually redraws correctly.They also compose: a boo session is just a PTY running a program, so you can run tmux inside one if you want.
by kylecarbs
6/12/2026 at 12:45:52 AM
Can you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) are getting classified that way.
by dang
6/12/2026 at 1:11:08 AM
Apologies, half of this indeed was. As I was iterating on the README this seemed apt, but I will refrain!by kylecarbs
6/12/2026 at 2:20:01 AM
Appreciated! The community feels strongly about this.by dang
6/11/2026 at 11:15:27 PM
[dead]by WalterGR