If you’re not aware, screen is a fantastic way to extend the usefulness of your terminal windows. I run a screen session on my laptop and one on every machine I SSH in to frequently. I just scp this file to any host I’m going to be working with for an extended time. “How to use screen” is a common enough blog post, so I’ll just skip to my .screenrc :
startup_message off term screen defscrollback 10000 escape ^Oo vbell off bind h prev bind C hardcopy hardstatus off bell_msg "" shell -$SHELL
The important parts here are ‘escape ^Oo’ to move the command key to something on my right hand and ‘defscrollback 10000′ so I can find things in scrolling log messages. Moving the command key to the right hand is important to avoid the extended finger yoga generally required by frequent keyboard shortcuts. The rest are just to remove some of the annoying bells and whistles and are well documented.
RANT TO ADMINS : Don’t change the default etc/screenrc! This will annoy the hell out of anyone trying to use screen on your box. Just because YOU like colorized numbered tab lists that flash and beep when you change windows, doesn’t mean all of your users will. Do you know how much time it takes to disable all that junk in a ~/.screenrc? [/rant]