Screen is a great program for running multiple virtual terminals from the command line.  It also gives you the ability to start a process, disconnect, and then come back to it later. If you haven't tried screen, I recommend getting to know it (it works great for a long makeworld or when recompiling your ports tree).

I always thought that screen (or the standard terminal program) was missing some thing though.  Wouldn't it be great if you could have a status bar at the bottom of your terminal that showed the time, hostname, load averages, and other stuff like that.  The regular bash shell can't do this but screen comes to the rescue once more.

Create a file in your home directory called .screenrc and place the following line in it.

 

caption always "%{= bf}%5n %t (%H) %l%=%Y-%m-%d %c:%s "

This will add a status line to the bottom of your terminal window.

 

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