On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Robert Nesius <nesius at gmail.com> wrote: > I've always viewed screen as something handy when your console/terminal is > an old-school wyse terminal. But you guys seem to be using screen/tmux in > the course of every-day work. In a modern desktop environment with a window > manager, is screen/tmux really better than, say, multiple > xterms/konsoles/etc...? While screen/tmux have *tons* of functionality, the killer function are made apparent when working on remote systems: 1. The ability to deal gracefully with network issues. If you're running in a screen session and your network connections drops, your terminal will remain happily running and is available to re-attach to once network issues are sorted out. 2. Related to #1, they offer the ability to start a long-running process, then detach from that console, letting the process keep running. Then you can re-attach at some point in the future to check progress, resume work, etc. This is also quite nice for interactive programs like irssi - you can just always keep yourself signed into IRC within a screen window, but then detach/attach as necessary. I also find the key shortcuts to change between screen windows to be easier to execute than the typical shortcuts to switch between separate xterms (though this could likely be overcome by making some custom shortcuts). - Erik