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GNU screen is a very neat tool that’s included in most Unix-like operating systems. It’s a utility that acts as a basic command line window manager, so you can maintain several open terminal sessions within one physical terminal.
In this article I will describe a very useful program: GNU Screen. Usually this program is used by people who have a shell account on a Unix server. But it can be also helpful to people who haven’t yet started to use a terminal or even Linux/Unix at all. Screen — simply — is a program which enables users to create more system shells without the need of logging in multiple times.
Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Interestingly, I could not find any decent comparison of their text display performance. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. When you compile a large project, you don’t want the console output to be the limiting factor.
The most important part of terminal emulation is how it displays information on the monitor. When you hear the phrase ‘‘text mode,’’ the last thing you’d think to worry about is graphics. However, even the most rudimentary dumb terminals supported some method of screen manipulation (such as clearing the screen and displaying text at a specific location on the screen).
FbTerm provides you with a fast terminal emulator that runs directly on your system's framebuffer. Using the framebuffer brings improved performance while allowing you to render UTF-8 text in the terminal. FbTerm aims to be at least as fast as the normal Linux kernel terminal while providing internationalization support and modern font handling with fontconfig.
