Question

I’m looking for a way to display the active user for each window in a GNU screen session in its the hardstatus line.

Example

I have the following windows open

• Window 0 - user1@localmachine
• Window 1 - user1@localmachine
• Window 2 - user1@localmachine SSH to user2@remotemachine

At the moment the hardstatus is:

0$ something [user1]    1$ something [user1]    2$ something [user2]

Where something [username] is typed in manually.

Is there any way to automatically display the windows current user?

Answer 1

You can use an escape sequence to set the window title, if that’s what you want:

echo -e '\033k'$USER@$HOSTNAME'\033\\'

Just add this line to your .bashrc or similar file.