The fact that this is still sometimes the most practical solution is amazing to me. I was trying to get an IRC client for my Droid so I could talk to my friends during a road trip I was on, but the connectivity was poor enough that any local client would leave gaps in the channel logs whenever I was out of service. After searching a bit for something that would hold my message buffer server-side, I ended up just SSHing into my VPS and running irssi through screen.

Most of the productive stuff we do with computers is still all about text. Our computers are replacing our TVs though.

That's what I've been using for all my IMing for the last Month or so and I'm loving it. If only it worked as well for web browing...

EDIT: Actually, how hard _would_ it be to make screen work with x-forwarding? This is unfortunately outside the area of my EEly expertise.

GNU screen, the most convenient approach to persistent, "distributed" personal computing :-)