Have you heard of tmux? Do you ache for terminal mutiplexing and persistent shell sessions? If not, you can probably skip this post. Hang tight, I have something more generally palatable in the works. In the meantime, if you want to read up, head to the tmux homepage.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://brettterpstra.com/2014/05/11/making-my-tmux-life-easier