
Share Applications and Monitors with screen #49
Chapter 7, Terminal Empowerment
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well in X terminals, too. I encourage you to try out all these dual-personal-
ity hacks in both virtual consoles, and X terminals and see for yourself how
well they work in both cases.
HACK
#49
Share Applications and Monitors with screenHack #49
Work together and collaborate on the console.
Although doing clever things with X gets most people’s attention, you can
perform some cool tricks with the console using a tool called screen.
screen is a window manager for your terminals. It provides the following
nice features:
• Multiple screens
• A scrollback buffer
• Copy and paste buffers
Although this sounds like a fairly boring list—after all, you can do this with
multiple X terminals—bear in mind that these features are provided within
the terminal. You don’t need to be using X; screen works just as well (or bet-
ter) from one of the Linux virtual terminals or even on a remote machine.
For more advanced use, it also provides the ability to detach and share the
output of a process. screen is a GNU tool and is available for most Unix-
based platforms, including Linux. Most, if not all, distributions provide a
package for it, or alternatively it can be downloaded from the GNU web site
and compiled.
You can access screen’s functions via the control key combination Ctrl-A.
Pressing this, and then the question mark (?) key, ...