Nesting terminal multiplexers is very good, I do it for exactly the use case you mentioned. Escaping your escape key is easy, with a little practice you won't even realize you're doing it.
I have a shell function called 'go' that creates a new screen and labels it, connects to the remote host via SSH, and then recreates or re-attaches to the remote scren as appropriate. My top level screen session currently has 8 remote hosts I'm logged into, each running their own nested screen sessions.
My go() function also reads my ~/.ssh/config file to grab all my host aliases so I can tab complete to them. Note, I'm a Perl programmer, and rarely write shell scripts, so this function may be kinda ugly.
go()
{
local OPTIND OPTARG
local SCREENCMD="screen -dRR"
while getopts "xn" flag; do
case "$flag" in
x) SCREENCMD="screen -xRR"; shift;;
n) SCREENCMD=""; shift;;
esac
done
if [ "$#" == "0" ]; then
echo "Need someplace to go."
return 1;
fi
while (( "$#" )); do
screen -t $1 ssh -tq $1 $SCREENCMD
shift
done
}
_go_show()
{
local curr opts
cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
opts=$(grep 'Host ' ~/.ssh/config | cut -d' ' -f2)
COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${opts}" ${cur}) )
}
complete -F _go_show go
You should know that the bash-completion package in Debian and kin does tab-expansion of ssh hosts in known_hosts and config. Also handles the --argument switches for just about all common utilities.
I have a shell function called 'go' that creates a new screen and labels it, connects to the remote host via SSH, and then recreates or re-attaches to the remote scren as appropriate. My top level screen session currently has 8 remote hosts I'm logged into, each running their own nested screen sessions.
My go() function also reads my ~/.ssh/config file to grab all my host aliases so I can tab complete to them. Note, I'm a Perl programmer, and rarely write shell scripts, so this function may be kinda ugly.