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A lightweight tmux alternative? Tmux is already an incredibly lightweight C program in terms of binary size and resource usage.
by randomtoast 2y ago
A lightweight tmux alternative? Tmux is already an incredibly lightweight C program in terms of binary size and resource usage.
- ethanpailes 2y agoYeah that's a good point, "lightweight" was probably not the best term. I meant lightweight in terms of the cognitive overhead of picking up a new tool, not really in terms of performance. I would expect that shpool will perform better on some workloads and tmux will perform better on others (though in both cases they are probably good enough). The main difference is that tmux is a power user tool that you generally invest in configuring and tweaking to get just right, while shpool is meant to be set up quickly to solve the specific problem of dropped connections and then mostly forgotten about.
- freedomben 2y agoInteresting thanks. I interpreted "lightweight" to mean available features. i.e. just the persistent connection, none of the other bloat[1]. [1]: to be clear, I don't mean "bloat" in a negative way. I'm a long time tmux user and I love it, absolutely love it, and won't be giving it up anytime soon. I don't personally think it has any bloat. But, I use the features. If one only wanted persistent connections, then all of tmux is quite a bit of bloat. It's all perspective.
- brisketbbq 2y agoDoes this mean you don't plan on taking any ideas from screen/tmux and implementing them in your tool?
- ethanpailes 2y agoWell potentially some, but definitely not tiling and screen splitting.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jacknews 2y agolightweight in terms of features of course. it simply allows you to have multiple shell/term sessions on a server and be able to switch between them from any terminal. Kind of a 'flat ctrl-Z' cum 'nohup' if you will. No windows, splits, etc, no client software at all in fact.
- wkat4242 2y agoOh thanks for checking, then I'll leave this. Splits are my primary feature in tmux.
- hnlmorg 2y agoI assumed they meant “lightweight” in the sense that tmux can take quite a bit of setup and practice to get comfortable in, when using for the very first time. I love tmux but it’s definitely not “n00b” friendly.
- MuffinFlavored 2y ago$ tmux # run your command in it # Ctrl+b D to detatch later, to attach back to it $ tmux a -t 0 That probably covers 50% of usage. The rest would be naming the sessions, splitting the window panes. Anything else?
- Tyr42 2y agoScrolling. That's a key feature when you don't reflexively use less and ] isn't a natural keybind for "let me scroll please".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hnlmorg 2y agoYes. Window management, mouse support, key bindings (I really dislike the defaults for a few of them), selection/copy/paste, macros etc All stuff that doesn’t need to be configured but if you look at any tmux tutorial you’ll see boat loads of details about. Which can be confusing because how do you know if you don’t need to know it? Also what’s the basics for one person isn’t going to be the basics for another. Eg I rarely use the detach capabilities these days whereas the panes and windows are something I do use lots. My point is this: tmux is sufficiently complicated that a complete beginner might not know what features they need to learn.
- CyberShadow 2y agotmux takes over scrollback, so it's not possible to scroll the buffer in the same way as without tmux. This tool seems to solve the problem more elegantly.
- whalesalad 2y agohttps://github.com/whalesalad/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf#L12 https://github.com/whalesalad/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf... Scrolling works pretty well for me.
- ethanpailes 2y agotmux does support scrolling and copy-paste, but they often work subtly differently than the way they do in a native terminal. For example, when I try putting `set -g mouse on` in `~/.tmux.conf`, scrolling mostly works fine but if I scroll up and then start typing or press up, I won't jump right to the bottom of the session the way I'm used to in native Alacritty (which I will often do as a way to return after scrolling back through a bunch of print output). This isn't a huge deal, and you can definitely get used to it, but it can be frustrating if you like how your normal terminal emulator works and don't want it to change.
- whalesalad 2y agonothing in life is free, what do you honestly expect?
- bobthecowboy 2y agoThis is kind of a strange comment to leave to the author of the tool that's being compared... Obviously "nothing in life is free" - the person you're replying to literally spent a bunch of time writing a solution to their problem. "what do you expect?" - the person literally wrote what they expected after having written the code to do exactly that. OP has been all over this thread being incredibly diplomatic in both explaining why they wrote a replacement for (part of) tmux, and constantly following it up with "but by all means if that doesn't sound right to you, use tmux it's a great tool". It feels a lot like "well, if you don't like it go do it yourself", which is deeply ironic.
- bjoli 2y agoLightweight in terms of speed. Tmux makes even the slowest terminal feel like a Ferrari. People say the use the likes of alacritty for the speed, and then they run tmux and make it slower than even gnome-terminal.
- kreetx 2y agoHow about calling it "fast" then?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]