For those wanting a less cryptic way of getting a nice screen set up, I can heartily recommend byobu (formerly called screen profiles). It gives you a nice default set of stuff at the bottom of the screen – the bottom line contains various handy status information, and the second from bottom line contains a list of your screen windows. All this can be configured in a nice easy ncurses menu by pressing F9.
The function keys are mapped to common operations:
- F2 – create a new window
- F3 – Go to the prev window
- F4 – Go to the next window
- F5 – Reload profile
- F6 – Detach from the session
- F7 – Enter scrollback mode
- F8 – View all keybindings
- F9 – Configure screen-profiles
- F12 – Lock this terminal
See this article for a tutorial and screenshots.
Byobu is in the ubuntu repositories from karmic (9.10) onwards. In jaunty it was called screen-profiles. Before that it can be installed from this ppa of from this download page. It’s widely packaged for other up-to-date distros aswell.
It does depend on python, but once you have byobu set up as you like it, you can have it generate a tar ball containing all you need to recreate your screen on another computer using byobu-export.