Screeen

Screen is a GNU project program that will allow your CLI applications to run in the background without x running. Using the terminal to run many programs, it will fast get messy having all the terminal windows in view. This is easy to take care of by installing screen.

When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it and then gets out of the way so that you can use the program as you normally would. At any time you can create a new window with other programs in them, kill the current, view scrollback, switch between windows, etc. As i stated before you programs still run when you are not viewing them. Everything you type is sent to the one keystroke that is used to initiate a command to the window manager. By default, each command begins with a control-a (abbriviated C-a from now on)

You will probably have screen installed on your system already if not, in Ubuntu do

$ sudo apt-get install screen

Then copy screenrc to your home directory

$ cp /etc/screenrc ~/.screenrc

If you would like to have screen always run with rtorrent (What I am using it for right now) add the following to your screenrc file

# Always start rtorrent with screen
screen -t rtorrent rtorrent


To start screen and rtorrent, simply run screen from a terminal . Control-a followed by d will detach screen and running screen -r will open screen again


Tip - Its common to use screen with ssh to use rtorrent on a remote machine. I will not get in to that just yet. Stay tuned for a article about ssh, x11 and the use of rtorrent on a remote machine.