Why is GNU Screen not showing the bottom window caption after split?

Question

Recently, screen has been failing to show the bottom region's caption after split:

I am on OS X 10.6 and this is the MacPorts package. Apple's screen at /usr/bin/screen does not have this problem:

What's going on? I haven't changed my .screenrc anytime recently, and it would be nice to fix this problem without having to recompile screen with debugging flags and go stepping through it with gdb.

(btw I am using the MacPorts package because it is compiled with the 256-color option, which I like to have for vim)

Answer 1

The author of the vertical split patch notes:

doesn't play nicely with captions (using caption string '' at least hides some
of the unpleasantness)

It appears that the MacPorts package now applies the vertical split patch by default, whereas it was offered as a variant the last time I installed it.

Solution: remove the vertical split patch from the port file:

diff --git a/Portfile b/Portfile
index 78e3a0b..37ee4d1 100644
--- a/Portfile
+++ b/Portfile
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ distfiles-append 18:encoding
 checksums       ${distname}${extract.suffix} md5 8506fd205028a96c741e4037de6e3c42 \
                 18 md5 e5c53546a5c4968bd7e807c88e6b2198 \
                 vproc_priv.h md5 50800817fa688e7e6ae379cd599f15ca
-patchfiles      patch-maxargs patch-windowsize patch-wrp_vertical_split patch-Makefile.in
+patchfiles      patch-maxargs patch-windowsize patch-Makefile.in
 depends_lib     port:ncurses

 extract.only    ${distname}${extract.suffix}