First, some background: Tmux is great but (like GNU Screen) introduces a layer of abstraction between you and the shell. You have to use its special keybindings

First, some background: Tmux is great but (like GNU Screen) introduces a layer of abstraction between you and the shell. You have to use its special keybindings to create new windows, switch window/pane, or most annoyingly to scroll through history. Control Mode removes that layer of abstraction, so (with iTerm) you can use all the normal terminal emulator functions to do what you expect: click on panes to select them, tmux windows are just native tabs, and you can scroll the terminal natively In effect, all the UI compromises you had to do to make use of tmux... go away. It’s a huge benefit, because it means all the friction of using tmux disappears. Instead of thinking “do i really want to deal with tmux’s UX for this quick ssh session?” (it’s never as quick as you think) I just do it. All my terminal sessions are now in tmux. If I’m doing something on a remote machine, i can confidently close my laptop and know i can restore later.