I freaked out when I found out about the "screen" command several years back. "screen" starts a virtual screen that you can detach from with "ctrl-a d" and you can log out, login from a different machine/session and reattach with "screen -r". it has history so you can run long running commands and reattach 3 days later to continue from where you left off as if you had been logged in the whole time.
Tmux is the new screen. tmux allows for emacs or vim key bindings to run around the buffer and search, splits horizontal and vertical and easier configuration: http://tmux.sourceforge.net/
Yup! You might want to try tmux, though. I used screen for many years and switched over to tmux about 2 years ago, and have been really happy with it. It (tmux) is also maintained more regularly now; screen development seems to have stagnated.
