GNU Screen - A Hacker's Ideal Terminal
You might want to consider tmux (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/) 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 (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/tmux6.png) are really nice. AFAICT, screen doesn't even officially have vertically split windows yet, it's still an unofficial patch.Either way, if you use Unix, learn to use screen or tmux. They're tremendouslyuseful. (Also: Noisy wireless connections are the new flaky dialup, when it comes to resuming shell sessions.)