GNU screen: A Graphical Replacement

GNU screen is an essential application, yet its learning curve is insanely steep. Even everyday users barely scratch the surface of what it can do due to lack of knowledge. Neither the defaults (e.g. no caption by default) nor the interface (e.g. tons of special key combinations that hopefully don't conflict with your existing applications) make things any easier. I've been thinking a lot about how to improve it.

Imagine what you could do if you were to use a GUI for some cool new version of screen. Now I know that there's a real benefit to the way screen works in that all you need on the client side is a terminal, and I'm sure many a GUI hater will think I'm missing the point of screen. Let's face it though, I do have a graphical desktop. Furthermore, I'm not talking about getting multiple terminals on the local system. Tabbed terminals solve that trivially. I'm talking about multiple terminals running on a remote system that may or may not be prone to sudden HUPs. Ideally, the GUI client could make things a lot more user friendly. Here's how you use screen:

(multiple ptys) <-> screen <-> ssh <-> your terminal

You type commands into your terminal, and screen does something with them. Sometimes the commands influence screen itself. Other times, screen passes them onto the active pty. Now, imagine an improved graphical version of screen. For the time being, I'll call it scrim, SCReen IMproved:

(multiple ptys) <-> scrim server <-> ssh <-> scrim client <-> (multiple GUI terminals, such as gnome-terminal)

Note that you now have 4 windows on the client, the scrim client and the 3 terminal applications. Perhaps you might use a terminal that supports tabs to consolidate the 3 terminals. Since the scrim client has its own window, it can be really easy to use, and there are no keybinding conflicts. The terminal applications each act like separate terminal sessions. A lot of multiplexing is going on between the scrim server and scrim client. There's a "tunnel" for each terminal, and a "tunnel" for the server and client to talk about configuration. Nonetheless, you can still close the scrim client and reconnect later without loosing anything. I'm not really proposing anything new except to say that an interface that's more like Remote Desktop could make using screen a lot more pleasant and reduce the learning curve.

Now, if I only had the time and intelligence to code it :) It makes me wonder how hard it would be to do something like this, writing the client and server in Python. Naturally, the server must be very standard, and there may be multiple clients for say, KDE, GNOME, OS X, etc. Specifically out of scope is dealing with any terminal code myself. Terminals are not for the faint of heart, and I think it's possible to just connect the two pty's and let terminal software do the hard work.

If you know of such an existing application, please tell me.