Geek Pit

I use GNU screen a lot. Nothing beats it for keeping SSH connections open to multiple servers, and it has some killer features if you spend a lot of time at a shell prompt. There is a very good introductory article up at Red Hat Magazine, a guide to GNU Screen. I particularly like their customization of the status line.

One customization I’ve had in my .screenrc for some time is to replace the normal command-key prefix (ctrl-a) with a single key (backquote), it’s much faster: escape ``
If you ever need to type a single backquote (like when you are editing a shell script), you just have to hit the backquote key twice in a row.

I would only add to the article that on Debian or Ubuntu, install screen with apt-get install screen.