screen.rc

A userfriendly screen.rc .

Gnu Screen is a terminal multiplexer. With it you can mange multiple virtual terminals in one terminal session and discard them to background (all running scripts on virtual terminals continue running) to reactivate it later. So it’s possible to open various shells in one single SSH session. But I don’t want to go to much into detail, if you are interested more information about it visit their website or use any search engine out there!

To install it on any Debian/Ubuntu derivative:

aptitude install screen

Here are the most useful commands:

Ctrl+a c

create a new virtual terminal

Ctrl+a SPACE

change to next terminal

Ctrl+a BACKSPACE

change to previous terminal

Ctrl+a [NUM]

change to screen number NUM

Ctrl+a Ctrl+a

change to last used terminal

Ctrl+a w

display titel of all terminals

Ctrl+a d

detach screen, all terms continue running in background until you re-attach them

Ctrl+a k

kill one single terminal

Ctrl+a \\

quit screen

Ctrl+a A

change the title of the actual terminal

Ctrl+a [

enable copy mode, you can browse through the terminal with the cursor

Ctrl+a ?

overview about all keys

Ctrl+a a

send Ctrl+a to the terminal, otherwise screen will capture the Ctrl+a

To get an overview of all deattached sessions just run

screen -ls

A detached session can be re-attached on your bash prompt with

screen -r [OPT-IDENTIFIER]

My Screen.rc

The original look and feel of screen is very ugly. It’s hard to keep track of all the virtual terminals and it’s nasty that you’re not able to scroll within the screen.

Just save the following file to $HOME/.screenrc and your screen-session will look like figure 1. This configuration allows you among others to scroll within the screen and enables some more key-bindings:

F2

create a new screen

F3

change to previous terminal

F4

change to next terminal

F5

enable copy-mode

F6

change titel of the terminal

F7

deattach the screen

F8

quit

Download it directly from your terminal:

wget -O $HOME/.screenrc http://binfalse.de/wp-content/uploads/pipapo/conf/screen.rc