[mst]

I use abduco for persistence - a very, very simple piece of code that -only- provides a persistent session, with one (configurable) keybinding to detach.

If you also want multiple terminals and screen splits and etc. it's designed to work with dvtm (by the same author) which provides that side of things.

Personally I tend to have a 2x2 grid of xterms on my local machine and four ssh connections to matching dtach sessions named project-{tl,tr,bl,br} but I suspect most people who aren't me would be happier with dvtm.