GNU Screen - A Hacker's Ideal Terminal
You might want to consider tmux (<a href="http://tmux.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://tmux.sourceforge.net/</a>) as an alternative. Its  cleaner (and, incidentally, BSD-licensed) codebase means that it's getting features that have been gathering dust on screen's to-do list for ages. Most notably, its dwm/XMonad-style layouts (<a href="http://tmux.sourceforge.net/tmux6.png" rel="nofollow">http://tmux.sourceforge.net/tmux6.png</a>) are <i>really</i> nice. AFAICT, screen doesn't even officially have vertically split windows yet, it's still an unofficial patch.<p>Either way, if you use Unix, learn to use screen or tmux. They're <i>tremendously</i>useful. (Also: Noisy wireless connections are the new flaky dialup, when it comes to resuming shell sessions.)