Screen is one of those UNIX utilities that I’ve sort of overlooked in the past. Yea, I’ve known about it, but I’ve stupidly neglected to use it until recently. If you’re not familiar with it, some of the finer points are:
1- lets you disconnect from a terminal, and then reconnect to it later. Say you’re at work and you kick off a program that is going to run for several hours. You can disconnect from the terminal, and from home, log in and reconnect to see the progress of the program is going,
2- lets multiple users join a terminal session,
3- allows you to move from session to session on a single terminal. I can have numerous shell sessions open and switch back and forth between them. Sure, you can do that with gnome-terminal, but you can do it with screen also.
4- you can split the screen into multiple sessions. At work I have my terminal set up to split into three sections the first 5 lines I use to monitor an application, the next 5 lines I use to tail syslog and the rest of the screen I use to do my work
Byobu is an enhancement to GNU Screen. They work together.
Byobu.
instead of running “screen” at the command line you would run “byobu”. This would reference your screen settings and apply some customizations, better key bindings, and a snazzy menu (F9) to make some of the configuration easier.
