Some basic info on screen:
The escape character is ^A (by default). This means that, instead of typing ^A to jump to the beginning of a line in anything with Emacs-style keybindings, you must type ^A-a. (Note, screen is case-sensitive on the keystroke following ^A).
To open a new terminal, type ^A-c.
To flip back to your most recent window, type ^A-^A. After you flip
to this, ^A-^A will jump back to where you just were. A similar behavior
is ^A-^H, which will jump back farther and farther in your window history,
without changing the ordering of the history (unless you were to execute
another window-changing command); to move back up in the window history,
use ^A-<SPACE>.
If you need a quick overview of commands, ^A-?.
You can move around among different windows with ^A-n and ^A-p.
Another handy feature is to set window titles; do this with ^A-A.
Then, use ^A-" to choose a window from a list, or, ^A-' to let you type
in the name of a window (or at least the first few characters) to jump to it.
^A-0 through ^A-9 will jump through the first ten windows. You can get a list
with ^A-w (in an xterm, this displays in the titlebar).
The most useful feature of screen, perhaps, is the ability to idle on
your favorite IRC channel 24/7/365. screen sessions can be detached with
^A-d. To resume, type screen -r. If there are multiple sessions available,
you can type screen -list to get a list, and then screen -r specifier
to get to a particular session. screen -R will also start a recent session,
or, if none is available, will open a new one. If you accidentally left
a session attached somewhere else, screen -d will detach it (screen -d -r
will detach and then subsequently resume it on the current connection).
To lock a terminal quickly, type ^A-x.
Monitoring log windows is done with ^A-M. Then, screen will alert you
whenever there is activity in that window, regardless of what window you
are currently viewing.
To split the window, type ^A-S. You can jump between the two with
^A-<TAB>. To hide the current mini-window, press ^A-X. To hide
all but the current mini-window, press ^A-Q.
~/.screenrc can contain windows that you might always want to start.
Just add a line to the file of the form "screen command". Other useful
lines to put in that file are "startup_message off"
and "screen -t title",
which will set the default title for new windows.
If a window dies, chances are you've probably pressed XON (^S, ^A-s, or
^A-^S); try ^A-^Q, ^A-q, and ^Q. If you must kill a window, type ^A-K.
screen emulates as many ANSI/VT100/VT102 functions as it can with your
current term-type. Internally, spawned shells will have the 'screen' type.
If you connect to a system that doesn't have screen installed, you'll get
"Terminal type 'screen' is unknown" messages. You can put something like
this in your ~/.bash_profile on those machines to remedy this:
if [ "$TERM" = "screen" ] ; then export TERM=vt100 ; fi
New as of Mar 12, 2006: a trick for using multiple terminals on one screen session simultaneously.
New as of Jul 10, 2007: another
tutorial that looks pretty good
twin, a similar idea
but more GUI-sh