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A Quick and Easy Guide to Tmux (2015)

176 points by mjirv 7y ago

mehrdadn 7y ago
Does tmux have anything like screen -R?
- cgrubb 7y ago
  tmux attach
- supakeen 7y ago
  Nothing like -R, but attaching tmux lets you swap the client between different sessions with `<your prefix> L` for last, `s` for an interactive list or `(`, `)` for next/previous, and some others I forget. If you want to list sessions before attaching then there's `tmux ls` :)
- Filligree 7y ago
  tmux new-session -A [-s <session name>]
grimgrin 7y ago
I don't go too crazy with tmux stuff, I am a very minimal user This is how I tend to start/restore a session: alias foo='tmux a -dt foo || tmux new -s foo'
ohazi 7y ago
I spent a while trying to file down some of the rough edges around different versions of tmux and compatibility with shells / colors / vim / scrolling / weird keycodes / etc. and have some commented dotfiles here: https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles It still has warts, but hopefully this is a useful reference to someone... I still haven't found a single source that covers all of these things well. Tmux config is surprisingly unintuitive.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  > Tmux config is surprisingly unintuitive. And sometimes you get some stray tmux process running in the background that somehow blocks it from updating the configuration until you find and kill every running tmux process. Really annoying.
  - na85 7y ago
    Isn't that a simple matter of ps aux | grep tmux kill -9 12345 ?
    - ljm 7y ago
      I prefer the nuclear option, which also gives you a bit of a gamble depending on your search string pgrep tmux | xargs kill -9
      - ryanianian 7y ago
        `pkill -9 tmux` (or `pkill -9 [t]mux` if you're doing it over ssh)
    - alpaca128 7y ago
      Yes, that is simple. Finding out the first time why it suddenly stopped updating the config - after it already worked multiple times minutes before that - is a different matter.
mikenew 7y ago
If you're a Linux user, a logical extension of this idea is to use a tiling window manager, and then you get the paneled window management for everything, not just your terminal. Being able to detach and re-attach to sessions is still really useful, but I never find myself wanting to use tmux for splitting up a terminal window when I'm already using a tiling window manager.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  I never got into those, because I have two modes of working. When I'm writing code, my hands are on the keyboard and I have several splits open and a vim session. When I'm doing anything else, I like to use a mouse because it gives me random access to windows.
- panpanna 7y ago
  Not for me. I like my terminals tiled (hence tmux) and everything else free floating. People say a tiled wm makes you more productive. But most of my time goes to thinking, I don't work in a factory...
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "I never find myself wanting to use tmux for splitting up a terminal window when I'm already using a tiling window manager" I don't want to launch extra terminal instances every time I want to split my terminal window. Also, there's no easy way to detach or reattach to separate terminals as there is to tmux. Nor is there an easy way to programmatically pass information to or from them while they are in the background or off-screen, etc. That's not to say that separate terminal windows aren't useful. They are, and I sometimes use them myself (particularly for drop-down terminals like guake or terminals in i3's scratchpad).
- AdrienLemaire 7y ago
  I've been a long-time user of both i3wm and tmux. If I had to mention a single reason for using tmux, it would be sessions (ie restarting X11 would keep the session alive). There are also some features like searching for text in open windows, that aren't available to a tiling window manager. It's not only about tiling. I also found that restoring tmux sessions (tmux-resurrect+tmux-continuum) was faster than restoring i3 workspaces.
monster_group 7y ago
Can anybody tell me how to scroll up in a tmux session? Whether I use mouse scroll wheel or keyboard, on scrolling up all I get is ^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  set -g mouse on in your ~/.tmux.conf should do the trick.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    I don't understand why this is not the default behavior.
    - 1996 7y ago
      Different mouse settings send different strings. You may not way to scroll by accident if your application can use scrolling for changing commands like psql You may want to do mouse scroll only if you initiated scrolling with say Shift+Page Up (for me, all the above)
    - johnr2 7y ago
      > I don't understand why this is not the default behavior I would guess it's because a lot of tmux users don't use a mouse on the text console.
  - reggieband 7y ago
    FYI - after you do this on Mac OS you can't copy to the system clipboard from the buffer using mouse unless you push `fn` before you click on the pane. I think there are workarounds to get from the tmux copy buffer onto the system clipboard but I usually just `Ctrl-b z` to zoom the pane to full-screen, hold down `fn` button to select text, then `Ctrl-C` like normal.
    - mhink 7y ago
1996 7y ago
Suggestion for your bash_login or equivalent, to automatically get back your session based on the IP you connect from (6to4 safe): REMOTEIP=`echo $SSH_CONNECTION |sed -e 's/::ffff://g' -e 's/ .*//g'` if [ -z "$SSH_CONNECTION" ]; then if [ "$TERM" != "tmux" ]; then tmux attach -t $REMOTEIP || tmux new -s $REMOTEIP ; fi ; fi I have static IPs and I like to come back to a server the way I left it the day before, from home or work. For pratical reasons (everything in one window), I often have tmux running inside GNU screen, with one GNU screen per remote server.
christophclarke 7y ago
>>> I’ll proceed to give them a two minute tour about what you can do with tmux. After that they’re either hooked and want to try it themselves or they tell me to go away with my ancient neckbeard tools and just use iTerm2. FYI, iTerm2 actually has a tmux integration. Allows you to get the best of native paneling and persistent sessions. https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html
donedealomg 7y ago
i3wm ftw why use tmux when you can have i3wm? i3wm increased my productivity.
panpanna 7y ago
> sudo apt-get install tmux (Ubuntu and derivatives) I believe you just insulted the entire Debian community. Jokes aside, tmux reminds me of emacs (similar esthetics & key bindings), the same way screen reminds me of vim (how do I get out of this thing?)
- jolmg 7y ago
  They both have both types of keybindings.
- gsaga 7y ago
  'pkill screen' should do it.
hitpointdrew 7y ago
I spend most of my day in terminals. If you are mostly just after tiling windows then I prefer, Tilix on Linux or iTerm on Mac OS. The only time I use tmux is if I am worried about losing my ssh connection and don't want my process to die.
- pkirk 7y ago
  Is your connection unstable? Then try Mosh ( https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/ )
landa 7y ago
The list of benefits is missing the main one: you don't have to touch your mouse again.
zepearl 7y ago
Usually the title of my terminal window displays some useful informations (e.g. the directory I'm currently in, or if I am installing some packages and their dependencies with "emerge somepackage" then I see what I'm currently emerging, etc...). Does anybody know how to display the exact same informations in Tmux' bottom green bar? I just want it to display the same stuff that I would otherwise see in the window title of my terminal emulator. I tried to search for it but I'm probably not using the correct terms so I didn't find anything that is relevant to this.
- ohazi 7y ago
  I moved my green bar to the top, but this might do what you need with some minor tweaking. https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf#L210-L216 https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf#L210...
- mikelward 7y ago
  http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#NAMES_AND_TITLES http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#NAMES_AND_T... case $TERM in xterm*) echo -e '\033]0;INSERT TITLE HERE\007';; screen*) echo -e '\033kINSERT TITLE HERE\033\\';; esac Based on what I do, but not in front of a computer to test exactly what I typed above.
nvahalik 7y ago
Holy cow tmux has changed my life. No longer do I have to worry about losing all of my process when I accidentally close iTerm. This, coupled with the fact that you can Ctrl-B Ctrl-B and control your tmux within tmux... It's even fairly easy to script and make awesome workflows. Take for instance this script which shows a diff in a left pane and a commit editor in the right pane: https://gist.github.com/nvahalik/36108d4b892b6f66982537235f9cf462 https://gist.github.com/nvahalik/36108d4b892b6f66982537235f9...
- sys_64738 7y ago
  I usually run screen within tmux if I need nested virtual terminals.
- dba7dba 7y ago
  I am sure you may know this already but iTerm has a prefenrece setting called "Confirm Quit iTerm2 ... command" Checking it on has saved me quite a bit of trouble.
  - nvahalik 7y ago
    Yes. But even with that, I've accidentally killed it before via Activity Monitor... still a great tip, though.
ronjouch 7y ago
I used to enjoy Tmux, then noticed I didn't need its core persistence/session feature; I mostly used it for windowing & tiling, which are okay but come with lots of warts you need to avoid, and before you know it your tmux.conf is 150 lines of stuff copy-pastaed from StackOverflow and the Arch wiki, mouse & copying keep being janky, and you're in for long sessions of configuration whack-a-mole where each fix somewhere breaks something somewhere else. Also, the client/server architecture is great if you need it, but for everyday development I don't, so I'd rather avoid the extra layer. Not blaming the authors/maintainers at all, they're responsive and Tmux is extremely reliable. But in the end, it feels like they're battling to implement features at the wrong layer, and UX suffers. In the end, I realized I just wanted a good terminal emulator that is {fast, featureful, scriptable, keyboard-friendly}. If that sounds familiar, give Kitty a try: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ (and run https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/ in it, but that's another discussion :)
- ohazi 7y ago
  Whereas I use it primarily for the persistence layer, since I'm often sshing on a flaky connection and it's nice to be able to leave things open and be able to come back to them, or to attach to a session I left open on my desktop when I'm away. Tabbing/windowing is a nice bonus; I don't use tiling in tmux all that much, since as you said, it can be done on a different layer, but it is occasionally useful. My biggest frustration is that there are like ten million places where you need to tweak options to have it behave like a normal shell (scrolling, selection, etc.). It would be nice if these were less quirky by default.
- taude 7y ago
  Interesting because I'm using it mostly as a windowing/tiling use case. I liked it better than using multiple windows/frames in say Emacs, and I didn't like learning new window/pane splits using iTerm2 (OS X). But you're super right, I have so many little "quirky" things that just don't work right, like I used to be able to easily double click a line and it would just copy it to a buffer; pasting from my host OS requires different key bindings, and my TMUX config file has slowly grown as I tried to get it working just right... Might be time for me to learn iTerm2 properly....(maybe I can modify keyboard shortcuts to be like Tmux for moving around to different panes....) But part of me worries about the time when I have to go back to a remote dev env where I'm expected to SSH to a protected source code machine.
kerouanton 7y ago
Having being a `screen` user for over two decades, migrating to tmux has been a pain. A week ago, however I discovered a wrapper called `byobu` (1) which really helps, and controls both screen and tmux depending on which one you have on your system. It basically wraps Function keys and more to tmux, but has plenty of other features. Time will tell if it was worth installing, but I do believe it's simpler for me to use it as a transition from screen. (1) https://byobu.org https://byobu.org
- philsnow 7y ago
  I've been a screen user for decades as well, and don't feel compelled to use tmux (and also tmux has one too many concepts for me, I don't need sessions). Did you find some compelling reason to switch?
  - rovr138 7y ago
    Screen has sessions too... unless I’m missing something and this means something else
  - Graziano_M 7y ago
    zoom pane is reason enough to me.
- AdrienLemaire 7y ago
  byobu certainly looks good, and I'd recommend it to any new user. Having spent a while to learn all the shortcuts of tmux and customizing my env with tpm plugins, there's low value in me re-learning a new set of shortcuts. I also wonder how byobu users can use their system-defined Function keys while using byobu, since it seems to have set shortcuts on all these keys.
raviolo 7y ago
One more interest feature which was not clearly described: you can attach two or more ssh connections (belonging to the same system user) to the same tmux session. Each displays the same thing in real time and has full control. We use this all the time for these two use cases: 1. Semi-permanent connections to the same tmux session on the server from multiple locations e.g. work and home. Come home and find things exactly the way you left them at work, and vice versa. 2. A sort of collaborative environment. We have something like “demo” user running tmux session, and multiple people from different remote locations login as “demo” and attach to the same tmux session. Again, everyone has full control and we can see each other’s actions as we also talk on the voice call in parallel. Usually much better experience vs. some sort of screen+control sharing solution, especially when some participants are on low-quality connections.
ninkendo 7y ago
To me, tmux only makes sense for remote servers. Why would I want to use it for local terminal sessions? Why not just have multiple terminal windows open? And multiple desktops instead of "sessions", etc? I use tmux with iTerm integration when SSH'd into remote machines, so that my tabs/window layout are preserved on the remote server when I reboot/reconnect. But why would I need that locally? iTerm already saves my windows and tabs/layout/etc... because I don't close them. Using tmux locally just seems like extra steps... when should I "actually" close a window, and when should I just detach it? Why is the distinction even important? If I don't want to see a window I can just minimize it, and if I want to actually close it, I can just... do that. Maybe because tmux has nice keyboard combos for doing window arrangement? But couldn't I just set up my window manager to do the same? Remote servers though, totally makes sense. Sometimes you have to disconnect your SSH session, so that you can reboot your local machine while leaving the session open. tmux is a necessary thing in that regard. But on a local machine, rebooting means I'm clearing all my state anyway, so what would it really mean to "resume" a tmux session? Maybe I just don't get it?
- kovek 7y ago
  I saw my manager masterfully move his cursor across his terminal, select some text, and copy it, all without using his mouse, inside tmux. I thought it was cool
  - ninkendo 7y ago
    Isn't a mouse generally better at that? I mean I generally consider my self pretty good at vim (people who watch me are generally pretty impressed at least), and I get the draw to using the keyboard for things, but the actual act of highlighting arbitrary text, vim is not particularly good at. And I can't imagine how tmux would be either.
    - dllthomas 7y ago
      Tap-tap-tapping your cursor around a row or column at a press is painful. But getting around by searching is often pretty effective - I don't know who wins in a race but it's fast enough not to break my flow.
ohm 7y ago
Is there a way to copy the whole tmux window buffer over ssh connection to a Linux or Windows system? So far I only saw iterm2 tmux control mode supporting this on osx. I saw lots of terminals have feature requests open for this functionality but none of them have traction on getting this feature implemented due to the lack of tmux control mode documentation. Terminator has a fork release supporting it but it did work well when I tried it.
- ghshephard 7y ago
  Tmux supports your local clients clipboard, so if you are in a tmux-session from your local client, you can copy your scrollback history (or window), into the clipboard, and just paste it locally. I do precisely that dozens of times a day.
hhmc 7y ago
tmux could really do with a 'vim-sensible' common sensible default configuration. Mirroring typical linux mouse copy-behaviour is perticularly painful (esp. in a multi-pane setup).
sys_64738 7y ago
You can also run tmux within Emacs. Start a term via <ESC>x then enter term and press return. You can now run tmux. Use Ctrl-C Ctrl J and Ctrl-C Ctrl K to switch between modes.
xelxebar 7y ago
While on the subject, I'd like to share a solution I came up with for nested sessions: https://github.com/xelxebar/tmux-addons/tree/master/nesting https://github.com/xelxebar/tmux-addons/tree/master/nesting Essentially, it defines some keys that let you "focus" on a particular nesting level. I've had some instances of needing four levels of nesting and found this to be quite nice. The configuration is a tad idiosyncratic due to the way tmux handles variables, but it should be pretty well document in the readme. Hopefully, someone else finds it useful. I've had to deal with sessions four levels deep and found this relatively ergonomic.
hpen 7y ago
I have used tmux non-stop since discovering and love it
JDiculous 7y ago
I wouldn't personally say that tmux is superior to something like iTerm2, but on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) there doesn't seem to be a superior alternative since I haven't found a decent terminal on this OS that supports tiling.
ghshephard 7y ago
I spend about 70+% of my day in tmux. I usually have 15-16 windows (which I work hard to keep pared down), and some key windows with 6 panes (that I have muscle memory regarding what they are precisely doing). I've got a fairly tight 242 line .tmux.conf that I git sync between my various workstations, with affordance for Linux/macOS/WSL to handle things like the clipboard. In addition to just keeping all my states managed cleanly, a couple of the many key features that I love about tmux: o No need for a mouse - this has been a life saver in the past when I was working on a customer site, and they had me locked down on a terminal environment where there wasn't any mouse pass-through for things like copy paste. o tmux restore/resurrect are a godsend. I can do weekly kernel updates on windows-fast ring/lose power, and get all of my sessions and scrollback history o A side benefit of the restore/resurrect capability, is that I can tar-ball my session state and have all my scroll back and commands on a separate system. One of nice tweaks that has made a difference for me is creating new-windows and requiring they be named - bind-key u command-prompt -p "WinName: " "neww -n %1" that Ensures all my windows have a name that makes sense. Love tmux, though, you can go down a rabbit-hole tweaking out your .tmux.conf.

176 points by mjirv 7y ago

mehrdadn 7y ago

Does tmux have anything like screen -R?

cgrubb 7y ago
tmux attach
supakeen 7y ago
Nothing like -R, but attaching tmux lets you swap the client between different sessions with `<your prefix> L` for last, `s` for an interactive list or `(`, `)` for next/previous, and some others I forget. If you want to list sessions before attaching then there's `tmux ls` :)
Filligree 7y ago
tmux new-session -A [-s <session name>]

grimgrin 7y ago

I don't go too crazy with tmux stuff, I am a very minimal user This is how I tend to start/restore a session: alias foo='tmux a -dt foo || tmux new -s foo'

ohazi 7y ago

I spent a while trying to file down some of the rough edges around different versions of tmux and compatibility with shells / colors / vim / scrolling / weird keycodes / etc. and have some commented dotfiles here: https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles It still has warts, but hopefully this is a useful reference to someone... I still haven't found a single source that covers all of these things well. Tmux config is surprisingly unintuitive.

alpaca128 7y ago
> Tmux config is surprisingly unintuitive. And sometimes you get some stray tmux process running in the background that somehow blocks it from updating the configuration until you find and kill every running tmux process. Really annoying.
- na85 7y ago
  Isn't that a simple matter of ps aux | grep tmux kill -9 12345 ?
  - ljm 7y ago
    I prefer the nuclear option, which also gives you a bit of a gamble depending on your search string pgrep tmux | xargs kill -9
    - ryanianian 7y ago
      `pkill -9 tmux` (or `pkill -9 [t]mux` if you're doing it over ssh)
  - alpaca128 7y ago
    Yes, that is simple. Finding out the first time why it suddenly stopped updating the config - after it already worked multiple times minutes before that - is a different matter.

mikenew 7y ago

If you're a Linux user, a logical extension of this idea is to use a tiling window manager, and then you get the paneled window management for everything, not just your terminal. Being able to detach and re-attach to sessions is still really useful, but I never find myself wanting to use tmux for splitting up a terminal window when I'm already using a tiling window manager.

rhinoceraptor 7y ago
I never got into those, because I have two modes of working. When I'm writing code, my hands are on the keyboard and I have several splits open and a vim session. When I'm doing anything else, I like to use a mouse because it gives me random access to windows.
panpanna 7y ago
Not for me. I like my terminals tiled (hence tmux) and everything else free floating. People say a tiled wm makes you more productive. But most of my time goes to thinking, I don't work in a factory...
pmoriarty 7y ago
"I never find myself wanting to use tmux for splitting up a terminal window when I'm already using a tiling window manager" I don't want to launch extra terminal instances every time I want to split my terminal window. Also, there's no easy way to detach or reattach to separate terminals as there is to tmux. Nor is there an easy way to programmatically pass information to or from them while they are in the background or off-screen, etc. That's not to say that separate terminal windows aren't useful. They are, and I sometimes use them myself (particularly for drop-down terminals like guake or terminals in i3's scratchpad).
AdrienLemaire 7y ago
I've been a long-time user of both i3wm and tmux. If I had to mention a single reason for using tmux, it would be sessions (ie restarting X11 would keep the session alive). There are also some features like searching for text in open windows, that aren't available to a tiling window manager. It's not only about tiling. I also found that restoring tmux sessions (tmux-resurrect+tmux-continuum) was faster than restoring i3 workspaces.

monster_group 7y ago

Can anybody tell me how to scroll up in a tmux session? Whether I use mouse scroll wheel or keyboard, on scrolling up all I get is ^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A^[[A

rhinoceraptor 7y ago
set -g mouse on in your ~/.tmux.conf should do the trick.
- panpanna 7y ago
  I don't understand why this is not the default behavior.
  - 1996 7y ago
    Different mouse settings send different strings. You may not way to scroll by accident if your application can use scrolling for changing commands like psql You may want to do mouse scroll only if you initiated scrolling with say Shift+Page Up (for me, all the above)
  - johnr2 7y ago
    > I don't understand why this is not the default behavior I would guess it's because a lot of tmux users don't use a mouse on the text console.
- reggieband 7y ago
  FYI - after you do this on Mac OS you can't copy to the system clipboard from the buffer using mouse unless you push `fn` before you click on the pane. I think there are workarounds to get from the tmux copy buffer onto the system clipboard but I usually just `Ctrl-b z` to zoom the pane to full-screen, hold down `fn` button to select text, then `Ctrl-C` like normal.
  - mhink 7y ago

1996 7y ago

Suggestion for your bash_login or equivalent, to automatically get back your session based on the IP you connect from (6to4 safe): REMOTEIP=`echo $SSH_CONNECTION |sed -e 's/::ffff://g' -e 's/ .*//g'` if [ -z "$SSH_CONNECTION" ]; then if [ "$TERM" != "tmux" ]; then tmux attach -t $REMOTEIP || tmux new -s $REMOTEIP ; fi ; fi I have static IPs and I like to come back to a server the way I left it the day before, from home or work. For pratical reasons (everything in one window), I often have tmux running inside GNU screen, with one GNU screen per remote server.

christophclarke 7y ago

>>> I’ll proceed to give them a two minute tour about what you can do with tmux. After that they’re either hooked and want to try it themselves or they tell me to go away with my ancient neckbeard tools and just use iTerm2. FYI, iTerm2 actually has a tmux integration. Allows you to get the best of native paneling and persistent sessions. https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html

donedealomg 7y ago

i3wm ftw why use tmux when you can have i3wm? i3wm increased my productivity.

panpanna 7y ago

> sudo apt-get install tmux (Ubuntu and derivatives) I believe you just insulted the entire Debian community. Jokes aside, tmux reminds me of emacs (similar esthetics & key bindings), the same way screen reminds me of vim (how do I get out of this thing?)

jolmg 7y ago
They both have both types of keybindings.
gsaga 7y ago
'pkill screen' should do it.

hitpointdrew 7y ago

I spend most of my day in terminals. If you are mostly just after tiling windows then I prefer, Tilix on Linux or iTerm on Mac OS. The only time I use tmux is if I am worried about losing my ssh connection and don't want my process to die.

pkirk 7y ago
Is your connection unstable? Then try Mosh ( https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/ )

landa 7y ago

The list of benefits is missing the main one: you don't have to touch your mouse again.

zepearl 7y ago

Usually the title of my terminal window displays some useful informations (e.g. the directory I'm currently in, or if I am installing some packages and their dependencies with "emerge somepackage" then I see what I'm currently emerging, etc...). Does anybody know how to display the exact same informations in Tmux' bottom green bar? I just want it to display the same stuff that I would otherwise see in the window title of my terminal emulator. I tried to search for it but I'm probably not using the correct terms so I didn't find anything that is relevant to this.

ohazi 7y ago
I moved my green bar to the top, but this might do what you need with some minor tweaking. https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf#L210-L216 https://github.com/ohazi/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf#L210...
mikelward 7y ago
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#NAMES_AND_TITLES http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/tmux.1.html#NAMES_AND_T... case $TERM in xterm*) echo -e '\033]0;INSERT TITLE HERE\007';; screen*) echo -e '\033kINSERT TITLE HERE\033\\';; esac Based on what I do, but not in front of a computer to test exactly what I typed above.

nvahalik 7y ago

Holy cow tmux has changed my life. No longer do I have to worry about losing all of my process when I accidentally close iTerm. This, coupled with the fact that you can Ctrl-B Ctrl-B and control your tmux within tmux... It's even fairly easy to script and make awesome workflows. Take for instance this script which shows a diff in a left pane and a commit editor in the right pane: https://gist.github.com/nvahalik/36108d4b892b6f66982537235f9cf462 https://gist.github.com/nvahalik/36108d4b892b6f66982537235f9...

sys_64738 7y ago
I usually run screen within tmux if I need nested virtual terminals.
dba7dba 7y ago
I am sure you may know this already but iTerm has a prefenrece setting called "Confirm Quit iTerm2 ... command" Checking it on has saved me quite a bit of trouble.
- nvahalik 7y ago
  Yes. But even with that, I've accidentally killed it before via Activity Monitor... still a great tip, though.

ronjouch 7y ago

I used to enjoy Tmux, then noticed I didn't need its core persistence/session feature; I mostly used it for windowing & tiling, which are okay but come with lots of warts you need to avoid, and before you know it your tmux.conf is 150 lines of stuff copy-pastaed from StackOverflow and the Arch wiki, mouse & copying keep being janky, and you're in for long sessions of configuration whack-a-mole where each fix somewhere breaks something somewhere else. Also, the client/server architecture is great if you need it, but for everyday development I don't, so I'd rather avoid the extra layer. Not blaming the authors/maintainers at all, they're responsive and Tmux is extremely reliable. But in the end, it feels like they're battling to implement features at the wrong layer, and UX suffers. In the end, I realized I just wanted a good terminal emulator that is {fast, featureful, scriptable, keyboard-friendly}. If that sounds familiar, give Kitty a try: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ (and run https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/ in it, but that's another discussion :)

ohazi 7y ago
Whereas I use it primarily for the persistence layer, since I'm often sshing on a flaky connection and it's nice to be able to leave things open and be able to come back to them, or to attach to a session I left open on my desktop when I'm away. Tabbing/windowing is a nice bonus; I don't use tiling in tmux all that much, since as you said, it can be done on a different layer, but it is occasionally useful. My biggest frustration is that there are like ten million places where you need to tweak options to have it behave like a normal shell (scrolling, selection, etc.). It would be nice if these were less quirky by default.
taude 7y ago
Interesting because I'm using it mostly as a windowing/tiling use case. I liked it better than using multiple windows/frames in say Emacs, and I didn't like learning new window/pane splits using iTerm2 (OS X). But you're super right, I have so many little "quirky" things that just don't work right, like I used to be able to easily double click a line and it would just copy it to a buffer; pasting from my host OS requires different key bindings, and my TMUX config file has slowly grown as I tried to get it working just right... Might be time for me to learn iTerm2 properly....(maybe I can modify keyboard shortcuts to be like Tmux for moving around to different panes....) But part of me worries about the time when I have to go back to a remote dev env where I'm expected to SSH to a protected source code machine.

kerouanton 7y ago

Having being a `screen` user for over two decades, migrating to tmux has been a pain. A week ago, however I discovered a wrapper called `byobu` (1) which really helps, and controls both screen and tmux depending on which one you have on your system. It basically wraps Function keys and more to tmux, but has plenty of other features. Time will tell if it was worth installing, but I do believe it's simpler for me to use it as a transition from screen. (1) https://byobu.org https://byobu.org

philsnow 7y ago
I've been a screen user for decades as well, and don't feel compelled to use tmux (and also tmux has one too many concepts for me, I don't need sessions). Did you find some compelling reason to switch?
- rovr138 7y ago
  Screen has sessions too... unless I’m missing something and this means something else
- Graziano_M 7y ago
  zoom pane is reason enough to me.
AdrienLemaire 7y ago
byobu certainly looks good, and I'd recommend it to any new user. Having spent a while to learn all the shortcuts of tmux and customizing my env with tpm plugins, there's low value in me re-learning a new set of shortcuts. I also wonder how byobu users can use their system-defined Function keys while using byobu, since it seems to have set shortcuts on all these keys.

raviolo 7y ago

One more interest feature which was not clearly described: you can attach two or more ssh connections (belonging to the same system user) to the same tmux session. Each displays the same thing in real time and has full control. We use this all the time for these two use cases: 1. Semi-permanent connections to the same tmux session on the server from multiple locations e.g. work and home. Come home and find things exactly the way you left them at work, and vice versa. 2. A sort of collaborative environment. We have something like “demo” user running tmux session, and multiple people from different remote locations login as “demo” and attach to the same tmux session. Again, everyone has full control and we can see each other’s actions as we also talk on the voice call in parallel. Usually much better experience vs. some sort of screen+control sharing solution, especially when some participants are on low-quality connections.

ninkendo 7y ago

To me, tmux only makes sense for remote servers. Why would I want to use it for local terminal sessions? Why not just have multiple terminal windows open? And multiple desktops instead of "sessions", etc? I use tmux with iTerm integration when SSH'd into remote machines, so that my tabs/window layout are preserved on the remote server when I reboot/reconnect. But why would I need that locally? iTerm already saves my windows and tabs/layout/etc... because I don't close them. Using tmux locally just seems like extra steps... when should I "actually" close a window, and when should I just detach it? Why is the distinction even important? If I don't want to see a window I can just minimize it, and if I want to actually close it, I can just... do that. Maybe because tmux has nice keyboard combos for doing window arrangement? But couldn't I just set up my window manager to do the same? Remote servers though, totally makes sense. Sometimes you have to disconnect your SSH session, so that you can reboot your local machine while leaving the session open. tmux is a necessary thing in that regard. But on a local machine, rebooting means I'm clearing all my state anyway, so what would it really mean to "resume" a tmux session? Maybe I just don't get it?

kovek 7y ago
I saw my manager masterfully move his cursor across his terminal, select some text, and copy it, all without using his mouse, inside tmux. I thought it was cool
- ninkendo 7y ago
  Isn't a mouse generally better at that? I mean I generally consider my self pretty good at vim (people who watch me are generally pretty impressed at least), and I get the draw to using the keyboard for things, but the actual act of highlighting arbitrary text, vim is not particularly good at. And I can't imagine how tmux would be either.
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    Tap-tap-tapping your cursor around a row or column at a press is painful. But getting around by searching is often pretty effective - I don't know who wins in a race but it's fast enough not to break my flow.

ohm 7y ago

Is there a way to copy the whole tmux window buffer over ssh connection to a Linux or Windows system? So far I only saw iterm2 tmux control mode supporting this on osx. I saw lots of terminals have feature requests open for this functionality but none of them have traction on getting this feature implemented due to the lack of tmux control mode documentation. Terminator has a fork release supporting it but it did work well when I tried it.

ghshephard 7y ago
Tmux supports your local clients clipboard, so if you are in a tmux-session from your local client, you can copy your scrollback history (or window), into the clipboard, and just paste it locally. I do precisely that dozens of times a day.

hhmc 7y ago

tmux could really do with a 'vim-sensible' common sensible default configuration. Mirroring typical linux mouse copy-behaviour is perticularly painful (esp. in a multi-pane setup).

sys_64738 7y ago

You can also run tmux within Emacs. Start a term via <ESC>x then enter term and press return. You can now run tmux. Use Ctrl-C Ctrl J and Ctrl-C Ctrl K to switch between modes.

xelxebar 7y ago

While on the subject, I'd like to share a solution I came up with for nested sessions: https://github.com/xelxebar/tmux-addons/tree/master/nesting https://github.com/xelxebar/tmux-addons/tree/master/nesting Essentially, it defines some keys that let you "focus" on a particular nesting level. I've had some instances of needing four levels of nesting and found this to be quite nice. The configuration is a tad idiosyncratic due to the way tmux handles variables, but it should be pretty well document in the readme. Hopefully, someone else finds it useful. I've had to deal with sessions four levels deep and found this relatively ergonomic.

hpen 7y ago

I have used tmux non-stop since discovering and love it

JDiculous 7y ago

I wouldn't personally say that tmux is superior to something like iTerm2, but on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) there doesn't seem to be a superior alternative since I haven't found a decent terminal on this OS that supports tiling.

ghshephard 7y ago

I spend about 70+% of my day in tmux. I usually have 15-16 windows (which I work hard to keep pared down), and some key windows with 6 panes (that I have muscle memory regarding what they are precisely doing). I've got a fairly tight 242 line .tmux.conf that I git sync between my various workstations, with affordance for Linux/macOS/WSL to handle things like the clipboard. In addition to just keeping all my states managed cleanly, a couple of the many key features that I love about tmux: o No need for a mouse - this has been a life saver in the past when I was working on a customer site, and they had me locked down on a terminal environment where there wasn't any mouse pass-through for things like copy paste. o tmux restore/resurrect are a godsend. I can do weekly kernel updates on windows-fast ring/lose power, and get all of my sessions and scrollback history o A side benefit of the restore/resurrect capability, is that I can tar-ball my session state and have all my scroll back and commands on a separate system. One of nice tweaks that has made a difference for me is creating new-windows and requiring they be named - bind-key u command-prompt -p "WinName: " "neww -n %1" that Ensures all my windows have a name that makes sense. Love tmux, though, you can go down a rabbit-hole tweaking out your .tmux.conf.