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Screen provides an escape mechanism to insert information like the
current time into messages or file names. The escape character
is %
with one exception: inside of a window's hardstatus
^%
(^E
) is used instead.
Here is the full list of supported escapes:
%
a
am
or pm
A
AM
or PM
c
HH:MM
in 24h format
C
HH:MM
in 12h format
d
D
f
F
h
H
l
m
M
n
s
S
t
u
w
-
qualifier: up to the current
window; with +
qualifier: starting with the window after the current
one.
W
y
Y
?
%?
is displayed only if a %
escape
inside the part expands to a non-empty string
:
%?
=
0
qualifier tells screen to treat the number as absolute position.
You can specify to pad relative to the last absolute pad position
by adding a +
qualifier or to pad relative to the right margin
by using -
. The padding truncates the string if the specified
position lies before the current position. Add the L
qualifier
to change this.
<
%=
but just do truncation, do not fill with spaces
>
L
qualifier tells screen to mark the truncated
parts with ‘...’.
{
}
`
c
and C
escape may be qualified with a 0
to
make screen use
zero instead of space as fill character.
The n
and
=
escapes understand
a length qualifier (e.g. %3n
), D
and M
can be
prefixed with L
to generate long names, w
and
W
also show the window flags if L
is given.
An attribute/color modifier is is used to change the attributes or the color settings. Its format is ‘[attribute modifier] [color description]’. The attribute modifier must be prefixed by a change type indicator if it can be confused with a color description. The following change types are known:
+
-
!
=
d
u
b
r
s
B
k
r
g
y
b
m
c
w
d
.
A one digit/letter color description is treated as foreground or background color dependent on the current attributes: if reverse mode is set, the background color is changed instead of the foreground color. If you don't like this, prefix the color with a ‘.’. If you want the same behavior for two-letter color descriptions, also prefix them with a ‘.’.
As a special case, ‘%{-}’ restores the attributes and colors that were set before the last change was made (i.e. pops one level of the color-change stack).
Examples: