Shells in tabbed windows in a terminal I want to do tabbed terminal stuff without having actual tab windows in my terminal application. Is there any good way to do this within bash? It would come in very handy with SSH if I could avoid signing in twice.

Well, not _bash_ per se, but at the console, you can use either screen or tmux. There's a question over at superuser with a nice answer for configuring screen to have a tab-like status bar: How do I use tabs with the Linux “Screen” program?, and you can do a similar thing with tmux.

Both programs can also split the terminal window into multiple independent sections; horizontal in all versions, and vertical split for tmux and not-yet-released version 4.1 of screen (available in Fedora 19, for example).