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GNU screen

The original terminal multiplexer.

GNU screen lets you start a long-running terminal session, detach from it, and reattach later, possibly from a different machine. A typical pattern is to ssh into a server, run "screen -S work" to start a named session, do whatever long-running work needs to happen, detach with Ctrl-a d, and come back later without losing any of the in-progress state.

Screen has been around since 1987, originally written by Oliver Laumann and Carsten Bormann at the Technical University of Berlin. Juergen Weigert and Sven Guckes later picked up maintenance, and the GNU project formally adopted screen in 1990. The codebase is conservative and changes slowly.

tmux has largely overtaken screen for new users — its configuration is more flexible, the status line is more informative, and it tends to feel more responsive on high- latency connections. But screen remains widely available (often preinstalled where tmux isn't), and its decades-old keybindings and configuration files continue to work, making it the safer choice on legacy or unusual systems.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install screen
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install screen
Arch:          sudo pacman -S screen
macOS:         already preinstalled