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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.