GNU screen breaks pastableTabs

[Adam Spiers]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 06:38:47AM +0100, Marc Lehmann wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:20:59PM +0000, Adam Spiers <rxvt-unicode at adamspiers.org> wrote:
> > Can anyone else reproduce this?  If I do
> > 
> >   echo "    blah blah\n\tblah blah"
> > 
> > with pastableTabs enabled (the default), during selection the tab is
> > correctly treated as an atomic unit.  However if I do the same from
> > within a GNU screen session, it is treated as a number of spaces.
> > What's going on there?
> 
> gnu screen replaces the tabs by spaces or other cursor movement.
> 
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:29:51PM +0000, Adam Spiers <rxvt-unicode at adamspiers.org> wrote:
> > Upon further inspection, the problem is even worse.  GNU screen also
> > breaks selections spanning lines - it causes urxvt to treat the end of
> > a line as if it was fully padded with spaces.  This could actually be
> > a show-stopper for me using urxvt, since I rely heavily on GNU screen :-(
> > Ideas much appreciated!
> 
> Well, what alternatives do you have to urxvt :) gnu screen breaks lines
> about the same way with any other terminal as well.

Apologies - I partially misdiagnosed the problem.  GNU screen replaces
the tabs by spaces like you say, but it does not break line-endings.
The culprit there actually turns out to be mutt.

So there are two questions:

  1. How to stop GNU screen replacing tabs with spaces?
  2. How to stop mutt padding the end of all lines with spaces?

However it appears that neither are related to urxvt.  Having said
that, it might be worth adding a caveat to the documentation for
pastableTabs warning that usage of GNU screen may break the behaviour.