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I’m always surprised to see that there are so many professional developers who never tried tmux and don’t really understand why a terminal multiplexer would be

I’m always surprised to see that there are so many professional developers who never tried tmux and don’t really understand why a terminal multiplexer would be useful. I’m in tmux all day and it’s one of the first things I install on any box. I’ll check out Zellij, but it’s a high bar for me to switch.

jerpint 3y ago
Same here, my tmux bindings are hardwired in my brain at this point and switching over would incur a huge drop in productivity at first, not sure I have it in me to switch… floating pane does sound nice though
- jayknight 3y ago
  Are floating panes much different that tmux's pop up windows?
jraph 3y ago
raises a hand My terminal emulator (Konsole) has tabs. It also has tiling features I've never taken the habit to use. It has infinite history and allows me to easily select and copy paste many lines. It has a perfect scrolling behavior: it automatically scrolls, but stops auto scrolling if I scrolled a bit up. I'm used to its keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs. My window manager (KWin) also has tiling-like features when I need to see several terminal sessions at the same time. I use screen when I need to be able to leave and rejoin later. I almost never need to restore several remote terminal sessions at once, and when I do, I'm happy to just ssh several times. I feel like my use case is completely covered by the terminal emulator and the WM which are incredibly convenient and efficient. I would expect any layer between this efficient / optimized character display and the programs I run can only add latency. I also quickly feel overwhelmed by a screen full of characters. I think I would miss out on convenience by switching to tmux and it's unclear to me what I would gain. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though :-)
- buserror 3y ago
  Same here, I use tilix as my new favourite, it has panes & tabs that are just there without having me to remember a complex combo... If I'm remote well I do it the old school way with gnu screen! I tried a few times to see if I could get any advantage using tmux but always revert back to none at all. To me the scrollback that works 'as expected' without having to remember key combos, and also work with the mouse are a key feature!
- blueflow 3y ago
  I got some odd reason why i need tmux: I can't use most "modern" terminal emulators because their input latency is awful and playing RTS games for a decade made me too sensitive to input latency. So i'm using xterm which provides no tabbing but with tmux.
  - jraph 3y ago
    I get this one. Have you tried Konsole? I've read it's actually one of the fastest, probably not more than xterm though and you'd need to be willing to use KDE software.
    - blueflow 3y ago
      I just did, while the input latency is not too bad, i dislike the KDE dependencies and the resource usage.
  - cultofmetatron 3y ago
    > I can't use most "modern" terminal emulators because their input latency is awful checkout kitty. its FAST. I used to use iterm and once I tried kitty for a day, iterm felt infuriatingly slow.
    - blueflow 3y ago
      If you have GPU support. I don't and it feels sluggier than konsole. Edit: Also kitty upstream does not offer a manpage.
nvtop 3y ago
I use tmux when SSH'ing to remote boxes, but when working locally I find native terminal panes and tabs to be a better experience. Does tmux provide anything extra to what wezterm/kitty/iterm2 do?
- eigenvalue 3y ago
  That’s true, but I do much of my work on remote boxes so it’s a less relevant comparison for me.
- i-use-nixos-btw 3y ago
  - a tmux session persists on the remote machine, whereas with direct SSH a disconnect loses what you were doing - a tmux session can be used by multiple people - with tmux a single command “tmux attach -t someusefulname” restores the layout and all of the commands used, saving a bunch of time and opportunity for error - tmux has an API, so you can spawn a fully loaded session from scratch with code, rather than by manually doing things or by having a pre-made session (this is soooo underrated, especially if you make it configurable) Honestly there comes a point where you just redesign the software and have it run in a more automated fashion anyway, but for the odd job that you have to run from time to time it’s very handy to have tmux as a persistent, shareable, configurable scratch space.
- thworp 3y ago
  You can use the tmux API or a plugin like tmuxp[1] to load a pre-configured session (including running arbitrary shell commands and setting layout). Using this you could automatically spawn your ssh connections as nested tmux sessions. Obviously this brings some complications, namely that you need to set different prefix keys (or double press prefix) and any non-prefix hotkeys always get sent to your local session. Personally I just configure remote tmux to have only prefixed keybinds and never make any complicated layouts on remote sessions so that having to press <inner-prefix> + <key> doesn't get annoying. [1]: https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp
- 0x008 3y ago
  You can use the same hotkeys to switcch between windows and panes that you use on the ssh box :=)
TomSwirly 3y ago
It depends entirely on what you're actually writing! In some jobs, I always have multiple tmux terminals running. I was about to claim that I have none running right now, but shamefully I have a Mastodon bot that I never productionized running in a tmux on my server. If you're exclusively a front-end JS developer, it's hard to see how you'd use tmux at all.
jlokier 3y ago
Smooth scrollback in a terminal emulator using the mouse/touchpad, with terminal tabs, is way too useful for me to switch to tmux for general use. I use scrollback a lot. Sometimes I search scrollback too, which some terminal emulators do nicely. If they would just add a tty protocol for good scrollback! :-) I do use GNU Screen on servers for long-lived sessions. Just because it's more familiar than tmux to me. It's great for persistence, but really annoying to have to use key combos to look through and search the scrollback in Screen sessions, so I tend to log all sessions to files and read the real-time logs with `less -R` and `ripgrep` when I need to look back through session history, even though I could use the Screen interface to do it.
- dmd 3y ago
  Using the mouse for scrollback within tmux works just fine. You can search in it too. https://asciinema.org/a/rVj7hp8oLOs0Zy43wc06lkyA9 https://asciinema.org/a/rVj7hp8oLOs0Zy43wc06lkyA9
christophilus 3y ago
I just use neovim and it’s built in terminal. I can split and navigate and telescope using my habitual nvim key commands. I haven’t seen anything tmux gains me over this setup (though I’m sure to be missing something). I do use tmux or screen when sshd into a server, though, just to survive disconnects.
- saintfire 3y ago
  I use tmux with neovim. Typically I just use neovim's tabbing and splits. However, when I'm running multiple processes such as a psql and a dev server I'll have that in another tmux session, usually split in there. Additionally, i can ssh into that neovim session if I switch to my laptop, or just leave it open for later without having to :mks!
square_usual 3y ago
I'm good with letting tiling be a concern of my DE/WM. That's consistent across all the windows I use - I don't have to memorize how tiling works in tmux vs in emacs vs in everything else; I have one setup, I create windows to tile and use tabs to multiplex within tiles. The advantage is that this setup gives me consistent, spacial access to even apps that otherwise won't tile, like Safari or Firefox. All the other advantages of tmux, i.e. that it is programmable etc. are just as true of my WM - I interact with it mostly using scripts I've written, and since this is a local machine I don't care about persistence.
chii 3y ago
> so many professional developers who never tried tmux and don’t really understand why a terminal multiplexer would be useful because they live in an IDE and don't need a terminal.

jerpint 3y ago

Same here, my tmux bindings are hardwired in my brain at this point and switching over would incur a huge drop in productivity at first, not sure I have it in me to switch… floating pane does sound nice though

jayknight 3y ago
Are floating panes much different that tmux's pop up windows?

jraph 3y ago

raises a hand My terminal emulator (Konsole) has tabs. It also has tiling features I've never taken the habit to use. It has infinite history and allows me to easily select and copy paste many lines. It has a perfect scrolling behavior: it automatically scrolls, but stops auto scrolling if I scrolled a bit up. I'm used to its keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs. My window manager (KWin) also has tiling-like features when I need to see several terminal sessions at the same time. I use screen when I need to be able to leave and rejoin later. I almost never need to restore several remote terminal sessions at once, and when I do, I'm happy to just ssh several times. I feel like my use case is completely covered by the terminal emulator and the WM which are incredibly convenient and efficient. I would expect any layer between this efficient / optimized character display and the programs I run can only add latency. I also quickly feel overwhelmed by a screen full of characters. I think I would miss out on convenience by switching to tmux and it's unclear to me what I would gain. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though :-)

buserror 3y ago
Same here, I use tilix as my new favourite, it has panes & tabs that are just there without having me to remember a complex combo... If I'm remote well I do it the old school way with gnu screen! I tried a few times to see if I could get any advantage using tmux but always revert back to none at all. To me the scrollback that works 'as expected' without having to remember key combos, and also work with the mouse are a key feature!
blueflow 3y ago
I got some odd reason why i need tmux: I can't use most "modern" terminal emulators because their input latency is awful and playing RTS games for a decade made me too sensitive to input latency. So i'm using xterm which provides no tabbing but with tmux.
- jraph 3y ago
  I get this one. Have you tried Konsole? I've read it's actually one of the fastest, probably not more than xterm though and you'd need to be willing to use KDE software.
  - blueflow 3y ago
    I just did, while the input latency is not too bad, i dislike the KDE dependencies and the resource usage.
- cultofmetatron 3y ago
  > I can't use most "modern" terminal emulators because their input latency is awful checkout kitty. its FAST. I used to use iterm and once I tried kitty for a day, iterm felt infuriatingly slow.
  - blueflow 3y ago
    If you have GPU support. I don't and it feels sluggier than konsole. Edit: Also kitty upstream does not offer a manpage.

nvtop 3y ago

I use tmux when SSH'ing to remote boxes, but when working locally I find native terminal panes and tabs to be a better experience. Does tmux provide anything extra to what wezterm/kitty/iterm2 do?

eigenvalue 3y ago
That’s true, but I do much of my work on remote boxes so it’s a less relevant comparison for me.
i-use-nixos-btw 3y ago
- a tmux session persists on the remote machine, whereas with direct SSH a disconnect loses what you were doing - a tmux session can be used by multiple people - with tmux a single command “tmux attach -t someusefulname” restores the layout and all of the commands used, saving a bunch of time and opportunity for error - tmux has an API, so you can spawn a fully loaded session from scratch with code, rather than by manually doing things or by having a pre-made session (this is soooo underrated, especially if you make it configurable) Honestly there comes a point where you just redesign the software and have it run in a more automated fashion anyway, but for the odd job that you have to run from time to time it’s very handy to have tmux as a persistent, shareable, configurable scratch space.
thworp 3y ago
You can use the tmux API or a plugin like tmuxp[1] to load a pre-configured session (including running arbitrary shell commands and setting layout). Using this you could automatically spawn your ssh connections as nested tmux sessions. Obviously this brings some complications, namely that you need to set different prefix keys (or double press prefix) and any non-prefix hotkeys always get sent to your local session. Personally I just configure remote tmux to have only prefixed keybinds and never make any complicated layouts on remote sessions so that having to press <inner-prefix> + <key> doesn't get annoying. [1]: https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp
0x008 3y ago
You can use the same hotkeys to switcch between windows and panes that you use on the ssh box :=)

TomSwirly 3y ago

It depends entirely on what you're actually writing! In some jobs, I always have multiple tmux terminals running. I was about to claim that I have none running right now, but shamefully I have a Mastodon bot that I never productionized running in a tmux on my server. If you're exclusively a front-end JS developer, it's hard to see how you'd use tmux at all.

jlokier 3y ago

Smooth scrollback in a terminal emulator using the mouse/touchpad, with terminal tabs, is way too useful for me to switch to tmux for general use. I use scrollback a lot. Sometimes I search scrollback too, which some terminal emulators do nicely. If they would just add a tty protocol for good scrollback! :-) I do use GNU Screen on servers for long-lived sessions. Just because it's more familiar than tmux to me. It's great for persistence, but really annoying to have to use key combos to look through and search the scrollback in Screen sessions, so I tend to log all sessions to files and read the real-time logs with `less -R` and `ripgrep` when I need to look back through session history, even though I could use the Screen interface to do it.

dmd 3y ago
Using the mouse for scrollback within tmux works just fine. You can search in it too. https://asciinema.org/a/rVj7hp8oLOs0Zy43wc06lkyA9 https://asciinema.org/a/rVj7hp8oLOs0Zy43wc06lkyA9

christophilus 3y ago

I just use neovim and it’s built in terminal. I can split and navigate and telescope using my habitual nvim key commands. I haven’t seen anything tmux gains me over this setup (though I’m sure to be missing something). I do use tmux or screen when sshd into a server, though, just to survive disconnects.

saintfire 3y ago
I use tmux with neovim. Typically I just use neovim's tabbing and splits. However, when I'm running multiple processes such as a psql and a dev server I'll have that in another tmux session, usually split in there. Additionally, i can ssh into that neovim session if I switch to my laptop, or just leave it open for later without having to :mks!

square_usual 3y ago

I'm good with letting tiling be a concern of my DE/WM. That's consistent across all the windows I use - I don't have to memorize how tiling works in tmux vs in emacs vs in everything else; I have one setup, I create windows to tile and use tabs to multiplex within tiles. The advantage is that this setup gives me consistent, spacial access to even apps that otherwise won't tile, like Safari or Firefox. All the other advantages of tmux, i.e. that it is programmable etc. are just as true of my WM - I interact with it mostly using scripts I've written, and since this is a local machine I don't care about persistence.

chii 3y ago

> so many professional developers who never tried tmux and don’t really understand why a terminal multiplexer would be useful because they live in an IDE and don't need a terminal.