http://magazine.redhat.com/2007/09/27/a-guide-to-gnu-screen/
A guide to GNU Screen
by The editorial team
written by Steve ‘Ashcrow’ Milner and Anderson Silva
The same way tabbed browsing revolutionized the web experience, GNU Screen can do the same for your experience in the command line. GNU Screen allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same “window.” By using different keyboard shortcuts, you are able to shuffle through the shell instances, access any of them directly, create new ones, kill old ones, attach and detach existing ones.
Instead of opening up several terminal instances on your desktop or using those ugly GNOME/KDE-based tabs, Screen can do it better and simpler.
Not only that, with GNU Screen, you can share sessions with others and detach/attach terminal sessions. It is a great tool for people who have to share working environments between work and home.
By adding a status bar to your screen environment, you are able to name your shell instances on the fly or via a configuration file called .screenrc that can be created on the user’s home directory.