The One with the Thoughts of Frans

If you’ve ever used SSH, you probably came across a situation where your connection got interrupted and you lost what you were doing, or maybe you simply wanted to carry over what you were doing remotely to your main computer. That’s what Screen is for, but it’s also useful on just one computer.

There are an awful lot of possibilities listed in man screen, but I only need a few.

• screen starts screen, obviously
• Ctrl + a, d to detach from a screen session
• screen -r to reattach
• Ctrl + a, c to create a new console (or type screen command to forgo on an essentially useless Bash session)
• Ctrl + a, Ctrl + a switches to the last active window
• Ctrl + a, n and Ctrl + a, p switches back and forth through windows
• Ctrl + a, X, where X is a number
• Ctrl + a, " gives you a list of windows to choose from; this isn’t very useful without naming the windows with Ctrl + a, A

I mostly learned this through a slightly more detailed guide, for the screen man page was a little too overwhelming to figure out what was useful and what wasn’t.