In my day to day activities, I use the terminal pretty actively. I hate the idea of having many seperate terminal windows open, so I’m very happy with screen. According to the manpage, Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes.
In order to keep track of active screens or display which screen is currently active, I use the following screen config:
#allow scrolling
#termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@
termcapinfo xterm*|rxvt*|kterm*|Eterm* ti@:te@
# Turn off that annoying start up message
startup_message off
# Turn the even more annoying whole-screen-flash-on-tab-complete "feature"
vbell off
# I use control+a for beginning-of-line, this remaps it to the tick/tilda key
#escape ``
# Bind tick+e to show the tick character since tick+tick is too convenience to toggle windows
#escape `e
# Window list at the bottom. hostname, centered tabs and redmarked active windows:
#shelltitle '$ |'
hardstatus alwayslastline
#hardstatus string '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%? %= %{g}][%{B} %m/%d %{W}%c %{g}]'
hardstatus alwayslastline "%{b kw}%H %{r}%1` %{w}| %{g}%c %{w}| %{y}%d.%m.%Y %{w}| %{g}%l %{w}| %{-b kw}%u %-Lw%{= rW}%50> %n%f %t %{-}%+Lw%<"
defscrollback 50000
This will produce the following result:
As you can see in the bottom, you see an overview of system vitals and the amount of screens and in red which one is active.