I spend a lot of time working on customer systems, particularly where we have to use a jump server or bastion host to access the rest of their network. I also spend a lot of time working from dodgy wifi and mobile connections trying to do something urgently or quickly. As a result, one of my favourite pieces of open source software is screen, it’s saved me more time than I care to mention. My biggest problem with it is that by default, there’s no immediate visual feedback to the list of screens you have open, so having spend a little time hacking together a personalise .screenrc file, I thought I’d post it for others to share:

hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "

The key string is the hardstatus at the bottom which prints a line at the bottom of the screen (alwayslastline). Most of this is setting colours/brightness settings, but basically this sets a line at the bottom of the screen which lists all the screens open and hi-lights the current screen.