GNU screen
Another tool that belongs to my favorites is GNU Screen. A couple of years ago i had a bad internet connection and when i was working on a remote shell i was always logged out and had to start over. I really hated that 
Today i don’t have this problem anymore, but i like to keep Irssi (an IRC user-agent) running, even when i’m not logged in. TIP Using Screen is an article that gives a couple of other reasons to use it and explains how it works. The default settings suck if you also use GNU Emacs. So i had to figure out a couple of keypresses. With “cat -v” i could easily see what those keypresses were. Here is my .screenrc file:
############################################## # Author: Tim Van Wassenhove # Update: 2006-02-06 03:02 ############################################## startup_message off escape ^Oo bind i screen -t 'irssi' 3 irssi bind v screen -t 'vim' 4 vim bind m screen -t 'mutt' 5 mutt bind b screen -t 'slrn belnet' 6 slrn -h news.belnet.be bind r screen -t 'slrn php' 7 slrn -h news.php.net bind e screen -t 'elinks' 8 elinks http://www.google.com