GNU Screen Hackery

Most people who do lots of work in a Linux terminal use GNU screen (tabbed terminals are for chumps.) If you're not familiar, it works like this: type screen. Type ctrl-a, c to create a new window. Type ctrl-a, p to go to the previous window, and ctrl-a, n to go to the next. Voila.

Not only does it give you the ability to multiplex many windows inside of one terminal, you can "detach" and "reattach" the screen session. So, you ssh to your server somewhere, and open up a bunch of windows doing various things. Then, you decide to go drink beer at the pub, who just happens to have wireless, so you ssh from your laptop to the server, and reattach. Voila again. You're back working where you were, and you didn't have to quit everything you were doing and set it back up again later. A lot of people use this for irc, to avoid quitting and rejoining the network frequently. But it's useful for any interactive shells you'd like to pick back up later, possibly from a new location.

Whether you're already familiar with screen or just learning about it, here's a cool tip. Put the following in your ~/.screenrc:

hardstatus alwayslastline "%-Lw%{= BW}%50>%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%< %=%D %M %d %c"
hardstatus string '%{= kK}%-Lw%{= KW}%50>%n%f %t%{= kK}%+Lw%< %{=kG}%-= %d%M %c:%s%{-}'

You can fiddle around with the control codes to change the colors, if you'd like. See the screen man-page for info on that.

This will give you a screen status line at the bottom of your terminal, showing the names of all your virtual windows, which one was previously active (for ctrl-a, ctrl-a flipping), and will show the currently active window name. This is really handy, especially if you're like me and have anywhere from 5 to 30 windows open in various screen sessions.

Here's my full screenrc:

# eater's elite .screenrc

shelltitle ''
vbell on
autodetach on
startup_message off
defscrollback 2048

hardstatus alwayslastline "%-Lw%{= BW}%50>%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%< %=%D %M %d %c"
hardstatus string '%{= kK}%-Lw%{= KW}%50>%n%f %t%{= kK}%+Lw%< %{=kG}%-= %d%M %c:%s%{-}'

The shelltitle is important. Otherwise all new windows will display a default title of "bash" (usually) and clutter up your elite new status bar. You can rename a window using ctrl-a, A.

With these additions, my status bar looks something like this:

0$ efnet 1$ svn 2$ foo.pl 3-$ blog.txt

"efnet" is the current because it's hilighted. "blog.txt" was the previous window because it's marked with the "-", so I can type ctrl-a, ctrl-a to flip back to it easily. If I want to change to "foo.pl", I can type ctrl-a, 2.

This makes it very easy to transition between many different windows, without the overhead of alternative approaches like tabbed-terminals or multiple instances of your terminal emulator.