Linux Desktop Hacks

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, ...