screen actually works the same way architecturally: it parses all output through its own built-in terminal emulator and redraws from that state on reattach. But that emulator is decades old and lags far behind what modern programs emit. Whatever it doesn't understand gets dropped or mangled on redraw. boo swaps that layer for libghostty-vt, Ghostty's VT core, so the saved state matches what your terminal would actually display, and terminal queries get answered while detached so TUIs don't hang unattended.

tmux is great, it was just never the model I wanted. I really liked screen's simplicity, sessions and a prefix key and nothing else to learn, and boo keeps exactly that.