11 ms·

I really disagree with the authors definition of minimal. Terminal emulators have such a minimal user interface as it is it's a bit boggling that I have to mak

I really disagree with the authors definition of minimal. Terminal emulators have such a minimal user interface as it is it's a bit boggling that I have to make the case for the following "bloat" that other terminal emulators have. I need scrollback because I do occasionally pick up my mouse and grab things that have scrolled off the screen. Tmux doesn't help with this but maybe there is some magic that I don't know these days. I need tabs. At any given time many of those tabs might have instances of tmux somewhere in their multiply nested depths, generally on remote hosts. I'm not going to start tmux on every local prompt just so I can use Alacritty and thus intentionally starting a tmux in tmux funshow. I use "Monitor for Silence" "Monitor for Activity" pretty consistently. It's free software so I glad the author is making something and hopefully enjoying the process. I can't really use this or consider it until he reconsiders. Maybe he'll get some collaborators that will argue him around on this. Cool project otherwise.

elihu 10y ago
Yeah, that was my reaction. > Features like GUI-based configuration, tabs and scrollback are unnecessary. The latter features are better provided by a terminal multiplexer like tmux. This seems kind of like saying "everyone should use their computer the same way I do". I don't use tmux; maybe I should learn to use it. However, I seem to be getting along fine without it, and no scroll back is a deal-breaker for me. That said, this is still a cool project and I wish them success.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  > This seems kind of like saying "everyone should use their computer the same way I do". People do have that attitude from time to time, in this case i'd phrase it more like "no one seems to use their computer the way i want to, so i wrote some software"
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  What you said doesn't make any sense to me. Firstly you insinuate that the author is requiring people to interact as they do - this evidently is not the case, a suggestion has even been made on one of many ways to behave differently. Secondly the "I seem to be getting along fine without it" statement pointlessly hampers progress. There is no basis or reasoning for this, instead there is a decision - whimsical by the looks of it - to not use it. You could say that you don't anticipate the gains of the system to be worth the transition cost, or you could actually try it and have some useful criticism, or any number of other things. Thirdly, the linked page doesn't ever mention the 'minimal' your parent introduces. Minimal implies sufficiency (least sufficient, but sufficient none the less), the Alacritty page states simple - which does not. I find the final comment hilarious. You have just denounced a tool based on an implementation triviality (which can be easily bypassed) and choose to summarise with a statement as undoubtedly false as it is trite. Did you read the page?
  - elihu 10y ago
    I think it's a cool project, but I personally wouldn't use it because it lacks a feature I expect terminal emulators to have and am not motivated to change how I use my computer. Other people may be happy with this program. If someone implements the feature I want some day, then I might use it as well. I'm sorry if I came across as overly critical of the project, that wasn't my intent. I just think they're limiting their audience by assuming that a feature that isn't important to the developers is unimportant to users because a workaround exists that the developers are satisfied with. People really don't like to change how they do things, regardless of whether the way they're doing them now is "the right way" or "the best way". Maybe they're making the right decision and everyone really should be using tmux, and if so, great, they'll have have a community of happy users. If their target audience is someone other than me, I'm okay with that.
haldean 10y ago
tmux has copy-mode (^B : copy-mode <enter>) which lets you scroll through history and copy out snippets without using the mouse. There are also some tips out there for nested tmux sessions. For what it's worth, I use tmux just like the author of this project: a single urxvt terminal with tmux running inside (no scrollbars, tabs, menubars, etc) and it works for me.
GrinningFool 10y ago
tmux does provide full scrollback with mousewheel support too. # Enable mouse support including scrolling set -g mouse on # Versions prior to 2.1 may want this too: set -g mouse-utf8 on history-limit 5000 # 5000 lines of history per pane. Adjust as needed.
- eridius 10y ago
  It's not as good as native scrollback though. For example, by default, as soon as you select something in tmux, the selection goes away, and you have to hit a tmux-specific keybinding to paste it back into the terminal. That's never what I want! If I'm selecting something it's probably because I'm going to copy it to my system keyboard. I think you can disable this part, except of course what you're left with at that point is a tmux selection, which is NOT a terminal selection, meaning you still can't copy it to your system clipboard. Also, scrolling is somewhat unreliable, although I still haven't figured out why. In any case, I use tmux in some of my terminal tabs, and very frequently I have to hit ⌘R to disable terminal mouse support just so I can select & copy something without tmux interfering (I could also hold down the Fn key, except I use an external Das Keyboard, and the Das Keyboard folks still haven't figured out that their Fn key should actually behave like Apple's Fn key and let the system know when it's pressed by itself, as opposed to what it does now which is simply modifying the keypress events for other keys without sending any independent event for the Fn key).
  - artursapek 10y ago
    Just get used to the keybindings. I find it much faster to search up and yank in tmux than scrolling and dragging to copy stuff.
    - rickycook 10y ago
      that as the case may be, the same argument applies to vim (i use vim, with at least some of its keyboard shortcut glory, and love it); it might be faster in a lot of cases, but at the end of the day editors like sublime, atom, brackets, etc all have a much larger user base because people aren't willing to learn
atombender 10y ago
> Features like ... are better provided by a terminal multiplexer I would strongly argue that this thinking is putting the cart before the horse. I don't use tmux, nor do I want to (though occasionally I have to use screen as a hack to keep programs running on remote servers, and I hate every second of it). Solutions like tmux arguably exist because terminals have poor UIs, and the terminal protocol is too weak to form the foundation for the kind of interactivity and statefulness provided by modern graphical UIs. If terminals were as powerful as, say, web browsers (not that I'm suggesting that anyone conflate them), the world would be a different, happier place. I think Hyper [1] is going down the wrong path, but I strongly believe a new "terminal-oriented UI model/protocol" could be invented that would scratch every possible itch — good for text, mouse support, custom UI widgets, seamless remote connections, multiple screen regions — without sacrificing functionality at all. [1] https://hyper.is https://hyper.is
- db48x 10y ago
  Have you heard of nohup?
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Sure. But nohup doesn't work for shells or anything interactive. You can't attach to it.
    - smegger001 10y ago
      or you could type CTRL+Z BG
      - netheril96 10y ago
        And that will still send the program SIGUP, killing it when you close the terminal or lose your ssh session.
        dbaupp 10y ago
kstenerud 10y ago
Yup, I'd consider MacOS Terminal to be minimal. Anything less than that I just wouldn't use. Anything with more features I probably wouldn't use, either.
GrayShade 10y ago
I never managed to actually like tmux. It breaks too much of what I'm used to, like mouse wheel scrolling, Ctrl-arrows, ESC in Vim and a lot of other small things. The ESC thing is fixable by configuration, at least, but I really doubt I can make tmux behave like my native terminal.
- rocqua 10y ago
  I'm not quite sure what you expect Ctrl-arrows to do, but I'd be surprised if tmux can't be made to keep that behaviour. If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, there's a lot of value to be gained from using tmux. It takes some configuration to get value from it, but there is value there.
Thaxll 10y ago
Yes, "tabs and scrollback are unnecessary" seriously, must be some sort of a joke, I work all day long in a terminal and tabs are a must have.
- rickycook 10y ago
  yeah, it's less "unnecessary", more "provided elsewhere". in this case, he's saying by tmux... which does mean learning a bunch of new keybinds, which is a little upsetting
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    You can also implement tabs in the window manager, e.g. as kwin does. Then you use tabs for everything. You can tab between terminal windows, which have tabs between terminals, which run shells in a multiplexer ;)
- wott 10y ago
  I work all days long in terminals and I never ever use tabs. So, "must have"...
- caconym_ 10y ago
  I work all day long in a terminal and use neither.
shmel 10y ago
I switched to tmux a few years ago and never looked back. What is your problem with mouse? I have quite basic tmux config, very basic terminal emulator (st) and enjoy mouse scrolling even in nested tmux scenarios. Selection is done with vim keybindings which is much faster than mouse especially if you scroll and look for something visually. I can relate to your feelings. In the beginning I was _very_ skeptical about running tmux locally. But very quickly I reconfigured tmux as I felt and stopped noticing at all if I work locally or remotely. Everything is very smooth and pleasant since then. The only bad thing I remember: default tmux keybindings suck. I just redefined almost everything.
- juandazapata 10y ago
  I agree. I also have a very basic tmux/vim setup and I can scroll, copy/paste and even resize tmux panels with the mouse.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - fernandotakai 10y ago
    same. my tmux conf is really small (maybe 20 lines) and it does everything i want -- mouse support, vim keybinds, huge scrollback.
    - ehsanu1 10y ago
      Are y'all on Linux/xterm or something? I've had trouble getting this to work in OSX with the default terminal. At one point I got it to partially work by installing some scary looking plugins, but it broke other mouse behavior for me (copy/paste I think).
      - bezhermoso 10y ago
        I'm on OSX and mouse-support. vim bindings, clipboard, and extended scrollback in tmux "Just Works™" in both Terminal.app and iTerm2. The only external software that I had to install separately is reattach-to-user-namespace to get the clipboard working. The only problem I encountered was really bad kernel panics when the tmux server exits (i.e. last session is closed), but it has been fixed as of tmux 2.1 as far as I can tell. I'd say give it another try; the problems you were having might no longer be an issue now.
glandium 10y ago
Moreover, tmux does its own output parsing, so when you do your `cat 1gb_file.txt` inside tmux inside a terminal, you have two layers of output parsing happening. I can't see how that doesn't impact the performance that is claimed for Alacritty. But perhaps tmux is really fast. I wouldn't trust a third party application to be part of the performance experience I'm claiming for my own application, though.
- therein 10y ago
  Couldn't you say that about SSH? If your application is taking forever reading from the stdout buffer, your application will block when it is trying to write to stdout with say, printf, or fprintf.
Ericson2314 10y ago
I avoid tmux and screen to. Instead I use SSH multiplexing (great for rsync tab complete too), and let the window manager so its job. All I need is an orthogonal solution for persistent shells (how about I persist arbitrary login process trees, graphical or textual, OK?) And I'll truly have no need for tmux. Then again I don't ssh too often for too long, so the last part is endlessly low priority.
discordianfish 10y ago
Surprised people consider tabs and scrollback similarly basic features. As someone using only basic linux terminal emulators like x/u/aterm or urxvt its interesting to see that people consider tabs a basic feature, while I don't know a single term without some scrollback. Really makes you realize how different people's expectations are.
stephen 10y ago
> I need tabs. At some point, every application (browser, terminal, tmux, ...) re-implementing their own version of tabs is kind of silly. Ideally "look at 'window' X of application Y" (where window == window / terminal tab / tmux pane / whatever) is what the local window manager should be used for. E.g. instead of 1 tmux session with 4 tabs in it (or 1 terminal window with 4 tabs in it), I will run 4 mosh/tmux sessions (or 4 terminal windows) with 1 tab each, and use my regular window manager commands (i3) to switch between them. In theory this is a better separation of concerns, and I can have one set of key bindings to do all window switching. Not: 1. Use window manager keys ctrl-foo to get to the right desktop/terminal window 2. Use terminal keys ctrl-bar to get to the right terminal tab with my tmux session in it 3. Use tmux keys ctrl-zaz to get to the right tmux pane (Obviously a contrived example.) ...that said, I still use a crap load of tabs in Chrome, so theory != practice.
wojcikstefan 10y ago
For anybody who agrees that they need scrollback to start using Alacritty seriously, the best way to show it is to give thumbs up on https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/124 https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/124.

elihu 10y ago

Yeah, that was my reaction. > Features like GUI-based configuration, tabs and scrollback are unnecessary. The latter features are better provided by a terminal multiplexer like tmux. This seems kind of like saying "everyone should use their computer the same way I do". I don't use tmux; maybe I should learn to use it. However, I seem to be getting along fine without it, and no scroll back is a deal-breaker for me. That said, this is still a cool project and I wish them success.

jfoutz 10y ago
> This seems kind of like saying "everyone should use their computer the same way I do". People do have that attitude from time to time, in this case i'd phrase it more like "no one seems to use their computer the way i want to, so i wrote some software"
Normal_gaussian 10y ago
What you said doesn't make any sense to me. Firstly you insinuate that the author is requiring people to interact as they do - this evidently is not the case, a suggestion has even been made on one of many ways to behave differently. Secondly the "I seem to be getting along fine without it" statement pointlessly hampers progress. There is no basis or reasoning for this, instead there is a decision - whimsical by the looks of it - to not use it. You could say that you don't anticipate the gains of the system to be worth the transition cost, or you could actually try it and have some useful criticism, or any number of other things. Thirdly, the linked page doesn't ever mention the 'minimal' your parent introduces. Minimal implies sufficiency (least sufficient, but sufficient none the less), the Alacritty page states simple - which does not. I find the final comment hilarious. You have just denounced a tool based on an implementation triviality (which can be easily bypassed) and choose to summarise with a statement as undoubtedly false as it is trite. Did you read the page?
- elihu 10y ago
  I think it's a cool project, but I personally wouldn't use it because it lacks a feature I expect terminal emulators to have and am not motivated to change how I use my computer. Other people may be happy with this program. If someone implements the feature I want some day, then I might use it as well. I'm sorry if I came across as overly critical of the project, that wasn't my intent. I just think they're limiting their audience by assuming that a feature that isn't important to the developers is unimportant to users because a workaround exists that the developers are satisfied with. People really don't like to change how they do things, regardless of whether the way they're doing them now is "the right way" or "the best way". Maybe they're making the right decision and everyone really should be using tmux, and if so, great, they'll have have a community of happy users. If their target audience is someone other than me, I'm okay with that.

haldean 10y ago

tmux has copy-mode (^B : copy-mode <enter>) which lets you scroll through history and copy out snippets without using the mouse. There are also some tips out there for nested tmux sessions. For what it's worth, I use tmux just like the author of this project: a single urxvt terminal with tmux running inside (no scrollbars, tabs, menubars, etc) and it works for me.

GrinningFool 10y ago

tmux does provide full scrollback with mousewheel support too. # Enable mouse support including scrolling set -g mouse on # Versions prior to 2.1 may want this too: set -g mouse-utf8 on history-limit 5000 # 5000 lines of history per pane. Adjust as needed.

eridius 10y ago
It's not as good as native scrollback though. For example, by default, as soon as you select something in tmux, the selection goes away, and you have to hit a tmux-specific keybinding to paste it back into the terminal. That's never what I want! If I'm selecting something it's probably because I'm going to copy it to my system keyboard. I think you can disable this part, except of course what you're left with at that point is a tmux selection, which is NOT a terminal selection, meaning you still can't copy it to your system clipboard. Also, scrolling is somewhat unreliable, although I still haven't figured out why. In any case, I use tmux in some of my terminal tabs, and very frequently I have to hit ⌘R to disable terminal mouse support just so I can select & copy something without tmux interfering (I could also hold down the Fn key, except I use an external Das Keyboard, and the Das Keyboard folks still haven't figured out that their Fn key should actually behave like Apple's Fn key and let the system know when it's pressed by itself, as opposed to what it does now which is simply modifying the keypress events for other keys without sending any independent event for the Fn key).
- artursapek 10y ago
  Just get used to the keybindings. I find it much faster to search up and yank in tmux than scrolling and dragging to copy stuff.
  - rickycook 10y ago
    that as the case may be, the same argument applies to vim (i use vim, with at least some of its keyboard shortcut glory, and love it); it might be faster in a lot of cases, but at the end of the day editors like sublime, atom, brackets, etc all have a much larger user base because people aren't willing to learn

atombender 10y ago

> Features like ... are better provided by a terminal multiplexer I would strongly argue that this thinking is putting the cart before the horse. I don't use tmux, nor do I want to (though occasionally I have to use screen as a hack to keep programs running on remote servers, and I hate every second of it). Solutions like tmux arguably exist because terminals have poor UIs, and the terminal protocol is too weak to form the foundation for the kind of interactivity and statefulness provided by modern graphical UIs. If terminals were as powerful as, say, web browsers (not that I'm suggesting that anyone conflate them), the world would be a different, happier place. I think Hyper [1] is going down the wrong path, but I strongly believe a new "terminal-oriented UI model/protocol" could be invented that would scratch every possible itch — good for text, mouse support, custom UI widgets, seamless remote connections, multiple screen regions — without sacrificing functionality at all. [1] https://hyper.is https://hyper.is

db48x 10y ago
Have you heard of nohup?
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Sure. But nohup doesn't work for shells or anything interactive. You can't attach to it.
  - smegger001 10y ago
    or you could type CTRL+Z BG
    - netheril96 10y ago
      And that will still send the program SIGUP, killing it when you close the terminal or lose your ssh session.
      - dbaupp 10y ago

kstenerud 10y ago

Yup, I'd consider MacOS Terminal to be minimal. Anything less than that I just wouldn't use. Anything with more features I probably wouldn't use, either.

GrayShade 10y ago

I never managed to actually like tmux. It breaks too much of what I'm used to, like mouse wheel scrolling, Ctrl-arrows, ESC in Vim and a lot of other small things. The ESC thing is fixable by configuration, at least, but I really doubt I can make tmux behave like my native terminal.

rocqua 10y ago
I'm not quite sure what you expect Ctrl-arrows to do, but I'd be surprised if tmux can't be made to keep that behaviour. If you spend a lot of time in the terminal, there's a lot of value to be gained from using tmux. It takes some configuration to get value from it, but there is value there.

Thaxll 10y ago

Yes, "tabs and scrollback are unnecessary" seriously, must be some sort of a joke, I work all day long in a terminal and tabs are a must have.

rickycook 10y ago
yeah, it's less "unnecessary", more "provided elsewhere". in this case, he's saying by tmux... which does mean learning a bunch of new keybinds, which is a little upsetting
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  You can also implement tabs in the window manager, e.g. as kwin does. Then you use tabs for everything. You can tab between terminal windows, which have tabs between terminals, which run shells in a multiplexer ;)
wott 10y ago
I work all days long in terminals and I never ever use tabs. So, "must have"...
caconym_ 10y ago
I work all day long in a terminal and use neither.

shmel 10y ago

I switched to tmux a few years ago and never looked back. What is your problem with mouse? I have quite basic tmux config, very basic terminal emulator (st) and enjoy mouse scrolling even in nested tmux scenarios. Selection is done with vim keybindings which is much faster than mouse especially if you scroll and look for something visually. I can relate to your feelings. In the beginning I was _very_ skeptical about running tmux locally. But very quickly I reconfigured tmux as I felt and stopped noticing at all if I work locally or remotely. Everything is very smooth and pleasant since then. The only bad thing I remember: default tmux keybindings suck. I just redefined almost everything.

juandazapata 10y ago
I agree. I also have a very basic tmux/vim setup and I can scroll, copy/paste and even resize tmux panels with the mouse.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- fernandotakai 10y ago
  same. my tmux conf is really small (maybe 20 lines) and it does everything i want -- mouse support, vim keybinds, huge scrollback.
  - ehsanu1 10y ago
    Are y'all on Linux/xterm or something? I've had trouble getting this to work in OSX with the default terminal. At one point I got it to partially work by installing some scary looking plugins, but it broke other mouse behavior for me (copy/paste I think).
    - bezhermoso 10y ago
      I'm on OSX and mouse-support. vim bindings, clipboard, and extended scrollback in tmux "Just Works™" in both Terminal.app and iTerm2. The only external software that I had to install separately is reattach-to-user-namespace to get the clipboard working. The only problem I encountered was really bad kernel panics when the tmux server exits (i.e. last session is closed), but it has been fixed as of tmux 2.1 as far as I can tell. I'd say give it another try; the problems you were having might no longer be an issue now.

glandium 10y ago

Moreover, tmux does its own output parsing, so when you do your `cat 1gb_file.txt` inside tmux inside a terminal, you have two layers of output parsing happening. I can't see how that doesn't impact the performance that is claimed for Alacritty. But perhaps tmux is really fast. I wouldn't trust a third party application to be part of the performance experience I'm claiming for my own application, though.

therein 10y ago
Couldn't you say that about SSH? If your application is taking forever reading from the stdout buffer, your application will block when it is trying to write to stdout with say, printf, or fprintf.

Ericson2314 10y ago

I avoid tmux and screen to. Instead I use SSH multiplexing (great for rsync tab complete too), and let the window manager so its job. All I need is an orthogonal solution for persistent shells (how about I persist arbitrary login process trees, graphical or textual, OK?) And I'll truly have no need for tmux. Then again I don't ssh too often for too long, so the last part is endlessly low priority.

discordianfish 10y ago

Surprised people consider tabs and scrollback similarly basic features. As someone using only basic linux terminal emulators like x/u/aterm or urxvt its interesting to see that people consider tabs a basic feature, while I don't know a single term without some scrollback. Really makes you realize how different people's expectations are.

stephen 10y ago

> I need tabs. At some point, every application (browser, terminal, tmux, ...) re-implementing their own version of tabs is kind of silly. Ideally "look at 'window' X of application Y" (where window == window / terminal tab / tmux pane / whatever) is what the local window manager should be used for. E.g. instead of 1 tmux session with 4 tabs in it (or 1 terminal window with 4 tabs in it), I will run 4 mosh/tmux sessions (or 4 terminal windows) with 1 tab each, and use my regular window manager commands (i3) to switch between them. In theory this is a better separation of concerns, and I can have one set of key bindings to do all window switching. Not: 1. Use window manager keys ctrl-foo to get to the right desktop/terminal window 2. Use terminal keys ctrl-bar to get to the right terminal tab with my tmux session in it 3. Use tmux keys ctrl-zaz to get to the right tmux pane (Obviously a contrived example.) ...that said, I still use a crap load of tabs in Chrome, so theory != practice.

wojcikstefan 10y ago

For anybody who agrees that they need scrollback to start using Alacritty seriously, the best way to show it is to give thumbs up on https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/124 https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/124.