Comment 2 for bug 369828

What if there were an option that allowed you to choose whether to precompute the length of those strings. After all, the hostname and username aren't likely to change while screen is running. Maybe even have separate selection items in the list, "hostname -- fixed" or some such. I think that the benefit of not having the windows overflow the caption greatly outways the benefit of being able to dynamically update the hostname in the rare event it actually changes.

After all -- it's a wrapper script that computes what to enable/disable anyway, there's no reason it couldn't switch out between a fixed-width pre-computed caption, and a dynamic one. Besides, most of the really dynamic stuff runs in hardstatus, not caption anyway.