GNU Screen – Fixing Unicode Character Echo Issues

I see two way to do this, the first one is to make a .screenrc file by host.
Like .screenrc_serverA, .screenrc_serverB, ...
In your shell startup script set SCREENRC to something like .screenrc_`hostname`
Of course you can use the source command of screen to include something like .screenrc_default in each custom .screenrc_… files so that they only contains a caption/hardstatus line and not the whole configuration each time.

The second way would be to execute commands like screen -X hardstatus lastline ... (using if tests to execute the command with different value for ... depending of the hostname) in your shell startup script. When you will log on the server, screen -X will do nothing because screen will not yet be launched, but each time you open a new windows in screen the hardstatus will be updated.

Of course the 1st solution is better because the second one will refresh the hardstatus line each time you opened a news windows which is probably useless as the hostname will not have changed.

Note that screen is a terminal emulator. So your question is a bit like asking how can I start xterm from gnome-terminal and have what was last displayed in xterm visible in my gnome-terminal when xterm exits.

Now the difference between xterm and screen is that while xterm uses the X protocol to draw its screen, screen uses a host terminal.

By default, screen will clear the screen of its host terminal to display its own emulated terminal and where available will use the alternate screen (before clearing) of that host terminal, so that upon termination, it can restore the host terminal state as it was before starting.

So what you see is not screen clearing the screen upon leaving, but restoring the host terminal's main screen. The content of the screen window that was last displayed is still there on the alternate screen. With xterm, you can have a look at it by selecting Show alternate screen in the Ctrl+MiddleClick menu.

If the host terminal doesn't support an alternate screen (like vt102 ones), it obviously can't do that. Instead, it does nothing, which is basically what you want.

So, what you can do is tell screen that the host terminal doesn't support an alternate screen. For that, you can add to ~/.screenrc:

 termcapinfo * ti=:te=

Which says: for all possible host terminals (*, matched against $TERM), override the termcap/terminfo database to say that for those terminals, the escape sequences to enter or leave the alternate screen are the empty string.

ti and te do not exactly mean alternate screen. From https://www.gnu.org/software/termutils/manual/termcap-1.3/html_node/termcap_39.html:

• ti (smcup in terminfo)
  String of commands to put the terminal into whatever special modes are needed or appropriate for programs that move the cursor nonsequentially around the screen. Programs that use termcap to do full-screen display should output this string when they start up.

• te (rmcup in terminfo)
  String of commands to undo what is done by the ti string. Programs that output the `ti' string on entry should output this string when they exit.

But that translates to the alternate screen for most terminal emulators (specically, in xterm it's alternate screen and saving/restoring of the cursor position)