They don’t run by themselves, they need a terminal emulator, or a console, underneath, so they can work. You can actually call screen on a console without graphical environment, and it’ll provide the console all benefits of multiplexing. That doesn’t make the multiplexer a terminal emulator by itself.

So, in my mind no, screen is not a terminal emulator, alacritty is, like xterm is, and so on. The multiplexor just adds extra capabilities to the terminal emulator.

At any rate, it’s not worth going any further. What I meant is that neofetch was able to find out and show I’m using alacritty, whereas fastfetch doesn’t show alacritty. And we can argue about the virtue of one or the other, but it’ll boil down to taste. I prefer how neofetch shows alacritty, hehe. Some might prefer fastfetch showing screen. And most importantly, this is not critical at all.

There’s an issue on fastfetch filed about it, and one of the devs indicated when using the screen multiplexer, they could find out the terminal emulator underneath, however they couldn’t do the same with tmux. And to be consistent among multiplexers, they decided not to expose the terminal emulator underneath when using multiplexers, just show the multiplexer. I don’t agree with that argument, but it’s the dev right to choose to do that.

Greetings !