7 ms·

Is tmux the GNU Screen killer?

131 points by tzury 15y ago

mahmud 15y ago
Front page? really? Do people even try to come up with article subjects lately?
mikey_p 15y ago
tmux is pretty amazing, I use it almost exclusively over screen or byobu. The only thing that beats it is iTerm2 on OS X in terms of ease of splitting, tabs, and ability to scroll each pane using mouse scroll wheel, etc.
- pilif 15y ago
  Soon you will be able to get both: http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration. This means that you will get iterm's native window splitting if you use tmux inside iterm or plain tmux if you are using another terminal
  - lamnk 15y ago
    O.o that's nice. Now THAT would be a reason I would consider to switch to tmux.
  - moe 15y ago
    I welcome every effort to supplement the crummy OSX window manager, but the iTerm tiling system is sadly a false start. They have the tab/split metaphor backwards. Real tiling WMs (such as ion3) put tabs on the individual split panes instead of having one global tab bar at the top - and for good reasons. As it stands you can not, for example, drag an iTerm tile to its own window or group multiple sessions in one tile. This may seem minor to the casual user but is a showstopper for those of us who would benefit from the tiling the most.
spatten 15y ago
If you're unfamiliar with either screen or tmux and looking to learn one, then I'd recommend going with tmux. I just made that switch myself recently, and found getting things set up how I liked them with screen extremely frustrating. With tmux, I was all set within an hour. I tried screen for a couple of weeks, then tried tmux, and was hooked almost immediately. I found scripting tmux to be much simpler, and setting up things like having the bottom bar notify me if there was new text in a window was so much easier in tmux. Install on OS X was easy: brew install tmux As a side benefit, having nested screen sessions (or nested tmux sessions) is kind of annoying. My solution is to use tmux on my laptop, and run screen on all of my servers. That way there's no nesting. I don't spend much time mucking around on the server, but so far I've found this quite satisfactory.
- pyre 15y ago
  My way around screen nesting is that I use non-standard key-bindings locally (which I find a lot better than the default ones), that way the default screen key-bindings pass straight-through.
mhansen 15y ago
No, Byobu is. https://launchpad.net/byobu https://launchpad.net/byobu
- rhdoenges 15y ago
  Byobu is really just a fancy configuration for screen. It still sits on top of the crazy screen codebase.
  - tonfa 15y ago
    But it removes many pains from screen, an easy configuration tool makes it way easier to use.
trezor 15y ago
Everytime I see "GNU Screen killer", I think it has the same chance of surviving as "iPhone killers" or "iPod killers". It might be better, but being touted as something which will "kill" something established, it's almost always doomed to "fail", that term (also) being warranted or not. I still see little reason to part from screen after all these years, and despite various offers of "better" options troughout the years. On the other hand, I did ditch my iPhone for an Android-phone. Although it was an Android-phone not labeled as an "iPhone killer".
- pyre 15y ago
  So a single blog post touting something as an 'X killer' is enough to make that product bad?
  - trezor 15y ago
    I'm not saying the product is bad, only that if it gets recognized or talked about as an "X killer" it will almost always fail deliver the specified "killing", and hence it's a "failure" in that regard. You also risk creating higher expectations than you can reasonably deliver. So basically, announcing your product as or having people talk about your product as a killer of any sort, is mostly a bad thing, be it a good product or not. You want people to say "it's very good", not "it's an X-killer". Or at least that is my experience and opinion on "X killer" as a branding-strategy.
- davidmat 15y ago
  Still, you have to admit, the iPhone is working pretty well as a Nokia killer ;)
  - qq66 15y ago
    His point still holds -- the iPhone was never touted as a "Nokia killer" -- it was touted as a "magical" new experience. And the popular press was quite dismissive at first of Apple's ability to compete in the mobile market.
- dspillett 15y ago
rbanffy 15y ago
> A feature that GNU Screen users have wanted for a long time is vertical splitting ^A-| works just fine here. IIRC, it's been working for quite some time.
- res0nat0r 15y ago
  This was added to the codebase a long time ago, the article is incorrect.
  - muppetman 15y ago
    Actually, the article is correct. However almost all distributions also add the patch to the code before they compile it. So vertical splitting, while not in the main tree yet, is pretty much available if you've installed GNU screen on any recent Linux distribution.
  - technomancy 15y ago
    IIRC it's in the codebase but not in a stable release yet. It also carries a performance penalty in Screen but not in tmux.
ciupicri 15y ago
> There was talk of a version 4.1, which would include this functionality, being released “soon” — but that talk was as far back as February 2007, and GNU Screen 4.1 still has not materialized. Fedora 15 comes with screen-4.1.0-0.3.20101110git066b098.fc15.x86_64. It's not an official release, but it doesn't mean that user can not benefit from new features like the vertical splitting mentioned by rbanffy.
- 1amzave 15y ago
  I found it to be quite buggy, however, so I built 4.00.03 from source and use that instead. (Lack of vertical split doesn't bother me very much.)
r00fus 15y ago
Anytime I see "Is X the Y killer" it's no. Can we please have better link titles?
- muppetman 15y ago
  The answer to you is no, I think it is. It's a question at least, it's not it it _is_ a killer. That I think is misleading. At least with this title you still have to come to your own conclusion. But yes, better article titles.
- mooism2 15y ago
  I agree that the answer to that question is almost always "no". But I think this case is a rare exception where the answer is "yes", or at least "probably". --- a GNU screen user who intends to switch over to tmux at some point.
- spicycode 15y ago
  In this case I think tmux replaced screen easily over a year ago.
  - joeyh 15y ago
    http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=screen+tmux&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&show_old=on&show_recent=on&show_nofiles=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1 http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=screen+tmux&#... tmux still has a long hill to climb. FWIW, my .screenrc is 4 lines. My .tmuxrc is 26 lines, and all it tries to do is get a behavior comprable to screen. Ie, using the same ctrl-a, supporting ctrl-ac without needing to release ctrl before the second character, allowing titles to pass thru tmux to the title bar, etc.
    - pyre 15y ago
      > my .screenrc is 4 lines. My .tmuxrc is 26 lines You should see my screenrc. > all it tries to do is get a behavior comprable to screen So, veering from the tmux defaults to change them to the screen defaults takes more work in tmux than in screen? Go figure! I never would have guessed. (Hint: It's easier in screen because they are the defaults) I've never used tmux and I find your post to be biased towards screen. tmux isn't being touted as a 'drop-in replacement' for screen, but that seems to be how you are evaluating it.
jvandenbroeck 15y ago
Byobu ftw http://dj-bri-t.net/2009/10/gnu-screen-and-byobu-made-easy/ http://dj-bri-t.net/2009/10/gnu-screen-and-byobu-made-easy/
travisjeffery 15y ago
Tmux is slightly nicer than GNU Screen is some respects but I still use GNU Screen. For one, Screen is everywhere. I can go from system to system and it'll be there. Also, I use a Mac and Tmux doesn't work with the Mac's clipboard; probably the biggest reason I can't use Tmux. Screen has had vertical splitting for sometime now, just get a beta release or build from source (https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=screen https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=screen). That's what I use and find very stable.
- voyvf 15y ago
  > For one, Screen is everywhere. I can go from system to system and it'll be there. And that would be why I still use screen, for the most part. Tmux is nice, but it isn't prevalent (yet.)
  - CountHackulus 15y ago
    Exactly. I need something that'll let me move from linux, to AIX, to z/OS, to even RHEL on Z. Screen lets me do that. Tmux doesn't come close.
    - pyre 15y ago
      Learning two products is too hard. This is why I would never use Linux at home since I need to use Windows at work.
- wizard_2 15y ago
  OSX clipboard integration? Can you elaborate?
  - spatten 15y ago
    Yes, I'd like to hear more about this too. Does screen integrate with the OS X copy / paste buffer?
    - mfontani 15y ago
anonymousDan 15y ago
Will there ever be a windows equivalent of screen? At the moment I can emulate its tabbing functionality using Console2, but that is still a long way short of the power of screen.
- Raphael_Amiard 15y ago
  You can do a minimal install of cygwin including screen, and then run it in console2. It is workgin quite nicely for me.
  - brunoqc 15y ago
    There's also mintty which I think it's putty without the network and serial code. I use it to copy/paste with the mouse. You can also set "UTF-8" in the options if you need.
lv_ 15y ago
tmux is indispensable to my job as a sysadmin. screen is just too confusing when you can't find which you worked on last. tmux ctrl-b w shows me a list of all my active sessions and i can key up key down. i could go on and on about more reasons why it's more useful to me than screen. godsend.
chrisjsmith 15y ago
I found tmux to be more intuitive and it actually works out of the box in a pleasant manor on both openbsd and debian without acres of configuration. That was enough for me to switch from screen.
rmc 15y ago
A (GNU Screen) Killer Feature: Provide an easy way to 'screen' an existing running process.
- adavies42 15y ago
  it's doable, but not terribly easy, at least as of last report. see retty http://pasky.or.cz/dev/retty/ http://pasky.or.cz/dev/retty/ or screenify http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2008/msg00421.html http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2008/msg00421.html.
rbanffy 15y ago
It took me about 15 seconds, a window resize, a horizontal split, a vertical one and a couple rotate windows to crash it.
- brunoqc 15y ago
  * I found a bug! What do I do? Please send bug reports by email to nicm@users.sourceforge.net or tmux-users@lists.sourceforge.net. Please include as much of the following information as possible: - the version of tmux you are running; - the operating system you are using and its version; - the terminal emulator you are using and the TERM setting when tmux was started; - a description of the problem; - if the problem is repeatable, the steps to repeat the problem; - for screen corruption issues, a screenshot and the output of "infocmp $TERM" from outside tmux are often very useful. http://tmux.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/trunk/FAQ http://tmux.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/trunk/FAQ
technomancy 15y ago
The biggest advantage of tmux is if you want to go multi-user. It can be done with screen, but it involves some pretty heinous setuid hacks. tmux doesn't invent its own permissions system; it just communicates over a socket. Anyone with permissions to read the socket can join. Anyone with permissions to write to the socket can interact. It's stupid easy.

131 points by tzury 15y ago

Front page? really? Do people even try to come up with article subjects lately?

tmux is pretty amazing, I use it almost exclusively over screen or byobu. The only thing that beats it is iTerm2 on OS X in terms of ease of splitting, tabs, and ability to scroll each pane using mouse scroll wheel, etc.

pilif 15y ago
Soon you will be able to get both: http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration. This means that you will get iterm's native window splitting if you use tmux inside iterm or plain tmux if you are using another terminal
- lamnk 15y ago
  O.o that's nice. Now THAT would be a reason I would consider to switch to tmux.
- moe 15y ago
  I welcome every effort to supplement the crummy OSX window manager, but the iTerm tiling system is sadly a false start. They have the tab/split metaphor backwards. Real tiling WMs (such as ion3) put tabs on the individual split panes instead of having one global tab bar at the top - and for good reasons. As it stands you can not, for example, drag an iTerm tile to its own window or group multiple sessions in one tile. This may seem minor to the casual user but is a showstopper for those of us who would benefit from the tiling the most.

spatten 15y ago

If you're unfamiliar with either screen or tmux and looking to learn one, then I'd recommend going with tmux. I just made that switch myself recently, and found getting things set up how I liked them with screen extremely frustrating. With tmux, I was all set within an hour. I tried screen for a couple of weeks, then tried tmux, and was hooked almost immediately. I found scripting tmux to be much simpler, and setting up things like having the bottom bar notify me if there was new text in a window was so much easier in tmux. Install on OS X was easy: brew install tmux As a side benefit, having nested screen sessions (or nested tmux sessions) is kind of annoying. My solution is to use tmux on my laptop, and run screen on all of my servers. That way there's no nesting. I don't spend much time mucking around on the server, but so far I've found this quite satisfactory.

pyre 15y ago
My way around screen nesting is that I use non-standard key-bindings locally (which I find a lot better than the default ones), that way the default screen key-bindings pass straight-through.

mhansen 15y ago

No, Byobu is. https://launchpad.net/byobu https://launchpad.net/byobu

rhdoenges 15y ago
Byobu is really just a fancy configuration for screen. It still sits on top of the crazy screen codebase.
- tonfa 15y ago
  But it removes many pains from screen, an easy configuration tool makes it way easier to use.

trezor 15y ago

Everytime I see "GNU Screen killer", I think it has the same chance of surviving as "iPhone killers" or "iPod killers". It might be better, but being touted as something which will "kill" something established, it's almost always doomed to "fail", that term (also) being warranted or not. I still see little reason to part from screen after all these years, and despite various offers of "better" options troughout the years. On the other hand, I did ditch my iPhone for an Android-phone. Although it was an Android-phone not labeled as an "iPhone killer".

pyre 15y ago
So a single blog post touting something as an 'X killer' is enough to make that product bad?
- trezor 15y ago
  I'm not saying the product is bad, only that if it gets recognized or talked about as an "X killer" it will almost always fail deliver the specified "killing", and hence it's a "failure" in that regard. You also risk creating higher expectations than you can reasonably deliver. So basically, announcing your product as or having people talk about your product as a killer of any sort, is mostly a bad thing, be it a good product or not. You want people to say "it's very good", not "it's an X-killer". Or at least that is my experience and opinion on "X killer" as a branding-strategy.
davidmat 15y ago
Still, you have to admit, the iPhone is working pretty well as a Nokia killer ;)
- qq66 15y ago
  His point still holds -- the iPhone was never touted as a "Nokia killer" -- it was touted as a "magical" new experience. And the popular press was quite dismissive at first of Apple's ability to compete in the mobile market.
dspillett 15y ago

rbanffy 15y ago

> A feature that GNU Screen users have wanted for a long time is vertical splitting ^A-| works just fine here. IIRC, it's been working for quite some time.

res0nat0r 15y ago
This was added to the codebase a long time ago, the article is incorrect.
- muppetman 15y ago
  Actually, the article is correct. However almost all distributions also add the patch to the code before they compile it. So vertical splitting, while not in the main tree yet, is pretty much available if you've installed GNU screen on any recent Linux distribution.
- technomancy 15y ago
  IIRC it's in the codebase but not in a stable release yet. It also carries a performance penalty in Screen but not in tmux.

ciupicri 15y ago

> There was talk of a version 4.1, which would include this functionality, being released “soon” — but that talk was as far back as February 2007, and GNU Screen 4.1 still has not materialized. Fedora 15 comes with screen-4.1.0-0.3.20101110git066b098.fc15.x86_64. It's not an official release, but it doesn't mean that user can not benefit from new features like the vertical splitting mentioned by rbanffy.

1amzave 15y ago
I found it to be quite buggy, however, so I built 4.00.03 from source and use that instead. (Lack of vertical split doesn't bother me very much.)

r00fus 15y ago

Anytime I see "Is X the Y killer" it's no. Can we please have better link titles?

muppetman 15y ago
The answer to you is no, I think it is. It's a question at least, it's not it it _is_ a killer. That I think is misleading. At least with this title you still have to come to your own conclusion. But yes, better article titles.
mooism2 15y ago
I agree that the answer to that question is almost always "no". But I think this case is a rare exception where the answer is "yes", or at least "probably". --- a GNU screen user who intends to switch over to tmux at some point.
spicycode 15y ago
In this case I think tmux replaced screen easily over a year ago.
- joeyh 15y ago
  http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=screen+tmux&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&show_old=on&show_recent=on&show_nofiles=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1 http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=screen+tmux&#... tmux still has a long hill to climb. FWIW, my .screenrc is 4 lines. My .tmuxrc is 26 lines, and all it tries to do is get a behavior comprable to screen. Ie, using the same ctrl-a, supporting ctrl-ac without needing to release ctrl before the second character, allowing titles to pass thru tmux to the title bar, etc.
  - pyre 15y ago
    > my .screenrc is 4 lines. My .tmuxrc is 26 lines You should see my screenrc. > all it tries to do is get a behavior comprable to screen So, veering from the tmux defaults to change them to the screen defaults takes more work in tmux than in screen? Go figure! I never would have guessed. (Hint: It's easier in screen because they are the defaults) I've never used tmux and I find your post to be biased towards screen. tmux isn't being touted as a 'drop-in replacement' for screen, but that seems to be how you are evaluating it.

jvandenbroeck 15y ago

Byobu ftw http://dj-bri-t.net/2009/10/gnu-screen-and-byobu-made-easy/ http://dj-bri-t.net/2009/10/gnu-screen-and-byobu-made-easy/

travisjeffery 15y ago

Tmux is slightly nicer than GNU Screen is some respects but I still use GNU Screen. For one, Screen is everywhere. I can go from system to system and it'll be there. Also, I use a Mac and Tmux doesn't work with the Mac's clipboard; probably the biggest reason I can't use Tmux. Screen has had vertical splitting for sometime now, just get a beta release or build from source (https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=screen https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=screen). That's what I use and find very stable.

voyvf 15y ago
> For one, Screen is everywhere. I can go from system to system and it'll be there. And that would be why I still use screen, for the most part. Tmux is nice, but it isn't prevalent (yet.)
- CountHackulus 15y ago
  Exactly. I need something that'll let me move from linux, to AIX, to z/OS, to even RHEL on Z. Screen lets me do that. Tmux doesn't come close.
  - pyre 15y ago
    Learning two products is too hard. This is why I would never use Linux at home since I need to use Windows at work.
wizard_2 15y ago
OSX clipboard integration? Can you elaborate?
- spatten 15y ago
  Yes, I'd like to hear more about this too. Does screen integrate with the OS X copy / paste buffer?
  - mfontani 15y ago

anonymousDan 15y ago

Will there ever be a windows equivalent of screen? At the moment I can emulate its tabbing functionality using Console2, but that is still a long way short of the power of screen.

Raphael_Amiard 15y ago
You can do a minimal install of cygwin including screen, and then run it in console2. It is workgin quite nicely for me.
- brunoqc 15y ago
  There's also mintty which I think it's putty without the network and serial code. I use it to copy/paste with the mouse. You can also set "UTF-8" in the options if you need.

lv_ 15y ago

tmux is indispensable to my job as a sysadmin. screen is just too confusing when you can't find which you worked on last. tmux ctrl-b w shows me a list of all my active sessions and i can key up key down. i could go on and on about more reasons why it's more useful to me than screen. godsend.

chrisjsmith 15y ago

I found tmux to be more intuitive and it actually works out of the box in a pleasant manor on both openbsd and debian without acres of configuration. That was enough for me to switch from screen.

rmc 15y ago

A (GNU Screen) Killer Feature: Provide an easy way to 'screen' an existing running process.

adavies42 15y ago
it's doable, but not terribly easy, at least as of last report. see retty http://pasky.or.cz/dev/retty/ http://pasky.or.cz/dev/retty/ or screenify http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2008/msg00421.html http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2008/msg00421.html.

rbanffy 15y ago

It took me about 15 seconds, a window resize, a horizontal split, a vertical one and a couple rotate windows to crash it.

brunoqc 15y ago
* I found a bug! What do I do? Please send bug reports by email to nicm@users.sourceforge.net or tmux-users@lists.sourceforge.net. Please include as much of the following information as possible: - the version of tmux you are running; - the operating system you are using and its version; - the terminal emulator you are using and the TERM setting when tmux was started; - a description of the problem; - if the problem is repeatable, the steps to repeat the problem; - for screen corruption issues, a screenshot and the output of "infocmp $TERM" from outside tmux are often very useful. http://tmux.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/trunk/FAQ http://tmux.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/trunk/FAQ

technomancy 15y ago

The biggest advantage of tmux is if you want to go multi-user. It can be done with screen, but it involves some pretty heinous setuid hacks. tmux doesn't invent its own permissions system; it just communicates over a socket. Anyone with permissions to read the socket can join. Anyone with permissions to write to the socket can interact. It's stupid easy.