15 ms·

Replacing tmux in my dev workflow

• prmoustache 1y ago
  I am regularly using waypipe to use a remote kitty terminal.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• znpy 1y ago
  Sounds like work-arounds and duck-tape-tier re-implementation of tmux features, to be honest. I'm still a gnu screen guy, but for me the trade-off is still in favour of screen/tmux.
• pure-orange 1y ago
  This doesn’t sound like a “you might not need tmux” argument. It more just argues than tmux is a pita on the terminal ecosystem which I’m sure is true. But the workarounds described are just reimplementing tmux features by taping together a bunch of tools. A better argument I think is - a lot of people do need tmux, so perhaps we should rethink protocols etc to make many of these features more native
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • charcircuit 1y ago
    It's more like you don't need to use a webpage that offers tabs using iframes because the browser natively has tabs that you could be using instead.
  • pastage 1y ago
    Having native scroll back should be possible if you hack tmux and a terminal emulator.
  • dizhn 1y ago
    weztern has a really strong solution in this space when you use it with its multiplexing server on the remote end.
  • mananaysiempre 1y ago
    At one point I was wondering if there was a preexisting protocol for a character-based framebuffer of some sort, that we could then use to slice the problem in a different way: a framebuffer multipliexer running terminal emulators inside it instead of a terminal multiplexer emulating multiple terminals into a framebuffer and then translating it back into terminal controls for the parent. Unfortunately, my conclusion was that the only independent character-based terminal tradition is IBM’s 3270 stuff, but even setting aside IBM weirdness it’s simply not that. (Yes, there’s also such a protocol within tmux but it’s not really compatible with anything else.)
  • rollcat 1y ago
    > It more just argues than tmux is a pita on the terminal ecosystem which I’m sure is true. Start thinking of tmux, screen, ssh, etc as terminal emulators, and everything will suddenly make sense. > perhaps we should rethink protocols etc to make many of these features more native I've been opposing terminal emulators (NOTE: emulators, not REPLs) for a long while. I also do believe we can collectively do better than emulating 1970s hardware. I do believe we can build applications where "ctrl-c" means copy, and selecting more than one screen's worth of text is possible. It's not hard, we're just stubborn.
    • em-bee 1y ago
      nitpick: ctrl-c never meant copy until windows started to dominate. it didn't even mean that in DOS. selecting more than one screens worth of text is possible in gui terminals and also in tmux. but i agree with your general point: we can collectively do better than emulating 1970s hardware absolutely!
      • rollcat 1y ago
        > nitpick: ctrl-c never meant copy until windows started to dominate. it didn't even mean that in DOS. VT102 wasn't designed with multiplexing in mind. The device was meant as a primary way to interact with a computer, not to perform the tasks of one - your physical keyboard also doesn't understand "copy". > selecting more than one screens worth of text is possible in gui terminals and also in tmux. It is but it isn't. You want to copy a multiline snippet of code you just wrote, you will have to manually strip away $PS1 & $PS2. You want to copy from vi into another window, you can't use the mouse - and you have to use a side channel. I have 20+ unfixable issues outlined, and I'm in the process of writing a blog post... But at my current rate, it could become a book.
        • em-bee 1y ago
          It is but it isn't. ok, yes, i was just talking about the simple case. you are right that the issue is more complicated, so i actually agree with you. i am talking about similar problems here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757142 i am looking forward to your post. i added your blog to my rss reader
• ivanjermakov 1y ago
  Most important tmux functionality is substituted with a window manager and a terminal emulator with normal mode support: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Vi_mode_and_copy/paste https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Alacritty#Vi_mode_and_copy/... But I agree that tmux sessions are convenient.
• imcritic 1y ago
  Correct statement, but poorly chosen alternatives: zellij is like tmux, but with less scrollback issues and supports mouse. It is also extensible.
  • seanhunter 1y ago
    Zellij is great. I have been very happy since I switched over.
    • belter 1y ago
      You did not hit any of these (many) issues? https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues?page=1 https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues?page=1
      • seanhunter 1y ago
        Nope. I use it with alacritty and I don't do things like trying to click on the bar etc that people are reporting as bugs. I have no idea why you would even do that. If you drive it from the keyboard as a "better screen/tmux" it works great. At least it does for me.
• tux3 1y ago
  People here are missing the point of the solution described in the blog post. This isn't about reinventing tmux poorly. They're trying to keep their workflow without having a muxer in the middle that needs to understand and translate every feature of the protocol, which is the core concept and the major problem with tmux. If you do splits client side, you don't have any software middlebox trying to interpret the traffic, so you keep native scrollback and all the fancy features of your terminal are still here. That's what the blog post is about. Not reinventing tmux, but getting rid of the muxing.
  • mongol 1y ago
    In the Youtube interview with Goyal linked in the post, he explained this well. He said he contemplated developing another approach for this if he found time, where the multiplexer communicated with the terminal differently. Hope he gets to work on it.
    • kzrdude 1y ago
      I recommend the interview, it's very good. It should be available in podcast form as well. The Kitty author comes across very well in the interview
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• sligor 1y ago
  Yes the clean and efficient alternative would be a session manager "server" running on the server and communicating with the terminal "client" (like kitty) using a more efficient protocol for handling panes/windows/drawing etc... AFAIK this doesn't exist, so I'm using tmux...
  • sligor 1y ago
    well after a quick search it exists: it's called tmux control-mode https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode So terminal clients just have to implement this protocol... it's already implemented in iTerm2
• panki27 1y ago
  Switching to WezTerm has completely eliminated the need for tmux for me - except for stuff I want to run server side, disconnect and come back to.
  • bezmiran 1y ago
    `wezterm ssh` can do this if wezterm is installed on the host.
    • zeendo 1y ago
      Yeah - it seems like this is a pretty undersold feature of WezTerm. It has completely eliminated tmux and Zellij for me outside of pairing with others.
  • barnabee 1y ago
    I agree. I've used first Kitty and more recently WezTerm (and now occasionally Ghostty, too) for years and every time I've tried tmux/zellij I've found nothing (except as you say for occasional long running server sessions) in either that justifies the noticable latency increase for me.
  • strobe 1y ago
    same, and those 2 plugins together completely eliminated need for tmux/zelij locally - https://github.com/MLFlexer/smart_workspace_switcher.wezterm https://github.com/MLFlexer/smart_workspace_switcher.wezterm - https://github.com/MLFlexer/resurrect.wezterm https://github.com/MLFlexer/resurrect.wezterm
    • zeendo 1y ago
      These seem nice but honestly feel like overkill for the most basic (and probably most typical?) use of tmux and similar. I generally have a single session I care about per machine (rather than per project) and wezterm's built-in multiplexing handles this out of the box.
  • aragilar 1y ago
    Maybe I'm a bit weird, but I don't know why you'd want to run tmux locally as an alternative to using tiling wm/tabs/other equivalent feature of your terminal emulator? I use tmux in two ways: 1. Persistent long-running sessions (which typically involve having more than one tty going at once, so something like shpool seems like a downgrade). 2. Local named-network-namespace sessions where I'm connected to a VPN and so not having to reconnect to the same namespace/vpn for every new tty is a benefit. Also, if you do physically connect to a headless machine, it's nice to not need to keep having to open a new getty session (or be able to log out of a session) ;)
• mickeyp 1y ago
  Better still, use Emacs as your terminal multiplexer: https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/replacing-tmux-gnu-screen-emacs https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/replacing-tmux-gnu-sc...
  • squishington 1y ago
    Named buffers combined with helm is so good!
  • cluckindan 1y ago
    Emacs is such a powerful tool, all it’s missing is a workable text editor ;-)
    • jwrallie 1y ago
      It does have evil mode ;)
      • linhns 1y ago
        Configuring in evil is a nightmare.
• plett 1y ago
  I view "you might not need tmux" in the same way as "you might not need browser tabs". Yes, if you only have one or two terminal sessions or open web pages then you can probably live without using them, but anything beyond that leads you into reimplementing features to cope with your desktop's lack of ability to manage dozens of windows.
  • 3036e4 1y ago
    That is something I have strived for recently, to use all the great window management features of my window manager of choice instead of browser tabs or lots of terminal tabs running tmux. If that didn't work well I guess it would have been a good sign that I need a better window manager. Even went back to use bookmarks instead of leaving hundreds of tabs open and having a bookmark bar instead of a tab bar is not bad at all.
  • tezza 1y ago
    MS Windows has excellent multi window management with Alt Tab Win Tab etc. Far superior to others. I have all my terminals with distinct icons and background colours to tell them apart. The operating system (Windows) does the heavy lifting. i tried Mac for about five years but missed MS Windows “every window can be alt tabbed to”. Mac has “every app can be command tabbed to and therein each app has its own subwindow management”
    • joleyj 1y ago
      > “every app can be command tabbed to and therein each app has its own subwindow management” This is so, so annoying. Your Mac app’s window is minimized? No alt-tab for you!
      • foldr 1y ago
        Just don’t minimize the window. Removing a window from the alt-Tab list is basically the only reason to minimize it in the first place on Mac. (Not reflexively minimizing windows does take some time to get used to if you’re coming from Windows, admittedly.)
• bobse 1y ago
  [dead]
• rnhmjoj 1y ago
  I stopped using tmux, but not for the reasons mentioned here. I think tmux is perfectly fine, I just don't like the default keybindings and I could never remember how to copy/paste between windows. I've switched to abduco for persistance and use neovim for window management (both vim and neovim have a built in terminal emulator). Using vim keybindings for managing windows and tabs is more natural, I can copy/paster just normally and you even get some perks like `gf` to quickly open a filepath under the cursor.
  • em-bee 1y ago
    is the vim terminal support that good now? i remember it being brittle. some apps, especially apps that use the full terminal window didn't run well inside the vim terminal.
    • rnhmjoj 1y ago
      The neovim terminal is pretty decent, the only feature I miss is reflowing the text on resize. I haven't used the vim one extensively, but I've heard it may even better than the neovim one.
• ramon156 1y ago
  Zellij has started to become messy in my setup (i don't mean to blame zellij, i just suck), so I'm looking into tmux now. I liked the fact I didn't need to set anything up for Zellij and could gradually add stuff
  • nobleach 1y ago
    I gave Zellij a shot a few months ago. It really felt too "modal" for me though. I've been a Vim user forever so I'm not exactly modal-averse. But TMUX has always felt more like Operator Pending mode in Vim. Having Zellij feel like full-on Normal mode was frustrating. After I gave up, someone told me they had their Zellij configured just like TMUX, and I should give it another shot with their config. I still haven't gotten around to it.
    • em-bee 1y ago
      could you share that config please? as a tmux user i feel like i might run into the same problems, and so a tmux like setup might be a good start.
    • metaltyphoon 1y ago
      Zellij has added a "locked" mode (defaults to Ctrl + g) where it acts just like Vim's normal/insert modes. So when to do mux commands you unlock it first.
• wheybags 1y ago
  > act as a drag on the ecosystem as a whole, making it very hard to get any new features I dont see this as an issue though. Terminals are pretty much a solved problem, they dont need any new features. IMO it makes more sense to spend effort on improving tmux<->terminal interop rather than adding fancy graphics protocols that we dont actually need.
  • em-bee 1y ago
    it's not fancy graphics that's missing from the terminal. but things like selection of text areas. (you can only select across the whole screen now, and if you are lucky you can select rectangles. but if i display text in multiple columns i'd like to be able to select one column at a time for example. this bites me every time when i use tmux or vim split windows. also filesystem navigation could be improved, multiline commandline editing is sorely lacking. fish tried that, but failed to make it work. clearly a limitation of the terminal. so no, terminals are not a solved problem.
    • cestith 1y ago
      Vim itself can select a column.
      • em-bee 1y ago
        but it's non-trivial to copy that selection to the outside of vim to another app. i can select a column in tmux too, using tmux commands, and then it's the same problem. i can't use that selection outside of tmux. i simply want the GUI to be aware that there are multiple columns in the terminal and let me select text within one using the mouse and then copy that to a different window/app.
        • mananaysiempre 1y ago
          > it's non-trivial to copy that selection to the outside of vim to another app A correctly compiled Vim will make the two X clipboards (“selections”) available as registers * (“primary”, i.e. the current selection, pasteable with the middle mouse button) and + (“secondary”, accessed with Ctrl-X/C/V) for both reading and writing. (I believe these are synonyms in graphical environments that don’t have two clipboards.) You can make one of them the default by adding set clipboard=unnamed resp. set clipboard=unnamedplus to your Vim configuration. > i can select a column in tmux too, using tmux commands, and [...] i can't use that selection outside of tmux. If you’re using Wayland on Linux, install wl-clipboard and put set-option -s copy-command wl-copy in your tmux configuration, and mutatis mutandis for other (local) graphical environments. Watch out for cases where you’ve trained yourself to assume that the tmux selection and the desktop’s clipboard aren’t the same thing. (I don’t know how I’d synchronize things in the other direction, that seems non-trivial.)
• esjeon 1y ago
  Interestingly enough, suckless folks took the opposite approach with their terminal: > Goals … Do not reimplement tmux and his comrades. ( From https://st.suckless.org/goals/ https://st.suckless.org/goals/ )
  • frantathefranta 1y ago
    I'd say suckless and Kitty are pretty much the polar opposites of development.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• fandalf 1y ago
  i smell copium
• nathan_compton 1y ago
  I just use Emacs for this.
• tombert 1y ago
  The keystrokes are so ingrained into me that you can take tmux from my cold dead hands. I use it a bit with remote connections, but tmux is basically my IDE for development. I have the backtick mapped as my prefix and I hope between terminals and Neovim, and I am considerably less productive when I don’t have this setup.
  • sgarland 1y ago
    Same. I’ve also been semi-forced to learn expect due to abysmally bad UX for how my company handles security (VERY secure, but in the most obtuse way possible), and that’s been a godsend. Not storing anything locally other than metadata, but expect lets me skip the obnoxious manual copy/pasting I would otherwise be doing. Sometimes, the old ways are better. A lot of times, actually.
  • dllthomas 1y ago
    I use tmux (or screen) as a bag for holding context. I set an environment variable before spawning it, and then key a lot of things in my .bashrc off that environment variable so I get context-specific functions/aliases/vars/etc, and keep them when I open a new window in an existing tmux. The single best part of this is separate histories for my development vs system administration vs whatever, although the rest is still quite useful.
• JdeBP 1y ago
  > if you do not set TERM with tmux properly, your colors will render incorrectly This is of course true of every other terminal emulator as well, and indeed it's not only colours that are incorrect. Function and editing keys get recognized incorrectly; REP can get used where it does not work; and even simple relative cursor motions can be done wrongly. TERM and the ideas incorporated into terminfo/termcap are inherent in the way that terminal devices work on Unices and Linux-based operating systems. That there are different terminals and terminal emulators not all speaking exactly the same protocol is also an unavoidable reality. Setting TERM properly isn't some tmux-specific problem.
  • blueflow 1y ago
    Yet the author incorrectly blames it on tmux, which gives the article a bad taste. Also im not sure whether the scolling problem is actually tmux fault. Tmux uses the alternate screen buffer, the alternate screen buffer is activated using the smcup/rmcup terminfo capabilities, whose semantics actually say that it "fixes" the window viewport in-place so absolute cursor movement has a known zero position. In this state, any native scrolling attempt should have no effect, and the keypress/scroll wheel events should be forwarded to tmux directly. For some reason, every other terminal emulator still allows local scrolling in the alternate screen, which kinda breaks the semantics of smcup/rmcup and easy scrolling in tmux, too.
    • aragilar 1y ago
      Sadly after experimenting with a bunch of "modern" terminals I'm forced to consider that their primary audience is more interest in ricing than actually implementing the terminal commands (or connecting to anything other than their favourite linux box) and so I'm stuck with xterm as the only reliable terminal emulator that won't occasionally spew unreadable junk.
      • sgarland 1y ago
        Have you tried Ghostty? Its creator has been pretty serious about getting everything right.
• d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
  I learned about Tmux just a few weeks ago and found out that one of the nifty features is that it is scriptable, I.e allows programmatically sending keystrokes to a specific pane. Then, inspired by some Japanese forums I asked myself if I can leverage this to have Claude Code actually interact with an interactive CLI script — we know CC can launch a script via bash but if said script waits for user input then CC can’t (easily) interact with it. Turns out yes we can leverage Tmux for this! So I used Claude Code to build a little el tool called Tmux-cli, which gives a convenient way to have CC (or any CLI coding agent for that matter) spawn a Tmux Pane, launch a script there, and actually interact with it. So it’s like Playwright/Puppeteer for the terminal. You can get it via uv tool install claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools There are some interesting possibilities this enables: Let CC autonomously test interactive CLI scripts, without me having to intervene and point out errors. Have the CLI coding agent launch UI from another pane and then use Puppeteer MCP to test from a browser. Let CC launch a cli script with a debugger enabled (e.g. Pdb) and set breakpoints etc — for token-efficient code understanding, debugging and explaining. Let the CLI coding agent spawn and drive another instance of the same or other CLI coding agent, AND interact with it. Note this is way better than CC sub-agents which are “spawn and let go” black-boxes. I wonder if the discussed Tmux alternatives enable building this type of tool.
  • franktankbank 1y ago
    Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
    • d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
      Nice. Had to look it up, didn’t know it was a famous Jurassic Park quote, even though I did see it when it came out :)
      • franktankbank 1y ago
        Right back at you. I think its a pretty interesting application.
• aap_ 1y ago
  Session persistence is the key feature for me. All the rest I don't need because i simply open more windows. However multiple windows (or whatever you call them) were really useful when I bought a vt100 as a teenager and programmed on that for a while for fun (with screen at the time, not tmux).
• wkat4242 1y ago
  > In summary: multiplexers add unnecessary overhead, suffer from a complexity cascade, because they actually have to translate escape codes, modifying them in hackish ways to get them to work with their concepts of windows/sessions. This is a feature for me. Because less and less applications bother supporting termcap, this way some applications can still work on my VT520. I don't really care what the kitty dev thinks anyway. He's entitled to his opinion but for me tmux is way more important. Also I think alacritty is better (though I generally just use Konsole). As a user I only care about what works well for me, not what's architecturally the most elegant solution.
  • JdeBP 1y ago
    You are very lucky to have a VT520. I have been idly on the look-out for a 525 for years, but not only are they inordinately expensive, the people selling them are not on the same continent as I am (and probably don't have my country's version of the LK). I've been on the lookout partly just to see whether this works properly with a genuine VT525: * https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/console-termio-realizer.xml https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/console-termi... Yes, should tmux ever go away, there's another option for transliterating terminal output of applications that just expect all of the modern stuff with AIXTerm's 16 colours and alternate screen buffers and mouse sequences and whatnot and do not check TERM properly. (-:
    • wkat4242 1y ago
      The 525 was the color version, right? I like the 520. It's easy because it's the last terminal DEC made, it's the fastest and it can work with ordinary PS/2 keyboards. The downside is the design is really boring. It looks like a typical OEM VGA monitor from the 90s that you got with every cheap PC clone. To be honest it's really hard to work with it these days because so many apps just blast xterm codes without checking anything. Tmux helps a bit but it's not perfect. However I love the feel of it, it's mainly nostalgic but it's also great it can be dimmed so low it's hard to read in a darkened room. My PC monitor is so bright I already use it at 0% brightness during the day. And at night in the dark (I leave the lights off when I have the windows open) it's basically unusable. The 520 is great then and also good for concentrating because there's no distractions. If you'd like me to test something let me know!
• jelder 1y ago
  This is written for the Linux-on-the-Desktop crowd, and good for them. But tmux really shines for folks using MacBooks with iTerm2. Its tmux integration is so good that it simply disappears into my workflow. With this in my `~/.ssh/config`, I can just type `ssh tmux` to get back to my remote dev box whenever I wake my computer or change connections. Host tmux HostName 1.2.3.4 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/etc.etc.etc RequestTTY force RemoteCommand tmux -CC new -A -s 0 With iTerm2's tmux integration enabled, this will pop open a new window where the remote tmux tabs and scroll buffer look and act just like native, local iTerm2 tabs and scroll buffer. I don't even know any tmux commands.
  • crtasm 1y ago
    Then a nice addition is to save typing it each time alias looptmux='while true; do ssh tmux; sleep 2; done'
    • nolist_policy 1y ago
      Better: autossh -M0 tmux
  • suslik 1y ago
    Wow, I've tried tmux like a hundred times and could never learn to like it, falling back to screen and promising to myself - never again. I'm going to break my promise to try this.
    • antonvs 1y ago
      > falling back to screen So you're saying you're a masochist
      • hdgvhicv 1y ago
        I’ve used screen for 25 years. What am I missing without tmux?
        • 1y ago
• canistel 1y ago
  From what I have seen, tmux is the _only_ multiplexer with with you can select from the scroll-back buffer using only the keyboard (without using the mouse).
  • meitham 1y ago
    Absolutely! You also have full control over the history size, along with powerful search capabilities. You can move panes and windows seamlessly across sessions, and even share those sessions with other users. My yank script integrates with tmux buffers, so copy/paste works flawlessly, even in vertical splits. I strongly disagree with the article; I simply can’t imagine using a terminal without tmux.
  • magarnicle 1y ago
    Do you mean select into the clipboard?
    • canistel 1y ago
      To tmux's clipboard and if required to the system clipboard too... set -s copy-command 'xsel -i'
  • jmholla 1y ago
    screen does as well. Unless I'm missing something here.
  • kzrdude 1y ago
    Loosely speaking neovim is a terminal multiplexer, and it can also do this, you have full vim motions and commands available on terminal buffers.
• charlie-83 1y ago
  I think a key piece of context to Kovid's distain of tmux is how good window management is in kitty. I regularly have at least ten terminals open and navigating them is a breeze. I previously lived in tmux but much prefer this. The session persistence thing is still best solved with tmux, however, I don't ever need this. Nohup is sufficient for long running commands where my ssh might fail. I don't really find myself sshing into a machine and then setting loads of env vars that I need to persist.
  • gchamonlive 1y ago
    For long running sessions I think screen is better... `nohup cmd &` is finnicky and I don't trust it to work on every software. I think `screen -S foo` and `screen -r foo` is much more ergonomic. No pipe to file, no disowned pid.
  • jon-wood 1y ago
    More generally I use a tiling window manager which is already doing pane/tab layout for me, but doing that with every window I have, so I don't really want tmux acting as a separate window manager just for shells.
  • em-bee 1y ago
    i tried using kitty a year ago. i was not impressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40478732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40478732 kovid is talking about how tmux gets in the way of terminals adding new features. i agree with that, but what about the features that tmux offers that i have yet to see in any gui terminal. (multiple sessions. the ability to connect to the same session from multiple terminals. scriptability, including sending characters into a terminal. splitting windows into multiple panes...) can kitty do any of those? if you want to add features to the terminal, then you have to content that tmux does as well, and maybe tmux features are more interesting to me than kittys. so if you want to win me over, then you have to actually implement some of the features of tmux that i use. (watching the interview, it looks like kitty does indeed implement some of tmux features, because interestingly the interviewer asks just the right questions. but i need to look for a more comprehensive introduction to see how kitty can replace tmux locally.)
• Myrmornis 1y ago
  If I were to stop using tmux, the things I would need to replace are: 1. zoom-pane (temporarily make one pane be the only pane) (also can someone please add this to vscode!) 2. keybindings to navigate focus between panes according to their layout positions 3. ability for another process to programmatically change which terminal window has focus, and window naming I think that's it. Could probably hack most/all of that together with hammerspoon I guess. I don't use it for persistence, and I certainly don't like the scrollback UX. It has got in the way from time to time, principally with its slow adoption of hyperlinks. But I'm general it's been a huge win for years.
  • sabellito 1y ago
    1. workbench.action.toggleMaximizedPanel
  • matthieucan 1y ago
    Have you tried "View: Toggle Maximize Editor Group" in VS Code? In my setup, it does roughly the same thing as with a tmux pane.
• nickjj 1y ago
  I still plan to keep using tmux. I like how it manages multiple sessions, making it easy to switch between projects and even resurrect them after rebooting. I also never had a problem with mouse copy / paste using tmux-yank. I've been using this set up for many years. One cool feature of tmux is its ability to send keys. I did that a few months ago when I was revamping my dotfiles. I kept changing aliases and other shell files and wanted to source those files in dozens of panes at once and also reload neovim when I changed certain config files. The above was pretty easy to pull off using a combo of tmux's built-in commands and a shell script. I made a post and video about that here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/running-commands-in-all-tmux-sessions-windows-and-panes https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/running-commands-in-all-tmux-...
• aragilar 1y ago
  It's a bit unclear what the limitations of the non-screen/tmux alternatives are E.g. how does the scrollback work if I were to disconnect and then reconnect with a different machine, can I view the scrollback like screen/tmux? It's also nice to be able to re-connect and be able to resume a session without having to reopen many terminals, which you would lose with the lack of window management.
• sevensor 1y ago
  Kitty is great; I want to see it succeed in pushing terminal emulators forward into the current millennium. However, I can’t use kitty at work, and I absolutely live inside of tmux. The server is where all the action is, and when I get disconnected, I want to be able to pick things up exactly where I left them. Window layout, the state of each shell and text editor, what’s in the copy buffer, scrollback, everything. I can’t give that up unless I have a suitable replacement on Windows. Until then I will continue to use tmux at work and kitty at home.
  • gorjusborg 1y ago
    I used Kitty for a while. I was impressed that I could recreate my tmux config pretty closely. I went back to tmux and basic terminal because it works everywhere, and composing tools is just more durable overall.
    • em-bee 1y ago
      how do you do something like tmux sessions (not just windows) in kitty? how does switching sessions and windows work? can i connect to the same session in multiple windows? or can i manage separate windows with different sets of sessions?
• submeta 1y ago
  I love tmux in combination with tmuxinator. Because with one command I can start my dev setup with one split for nvim, one for lazygit, one for yazi and one for claude code. In another window I can run the server, in another I can tail the logfiles. I have similar setups for various projetcts and do not need to manually start services, tools, whatnot. With `mx projectx` everything is started within seconds. And navigating panes and windows is super easy with the proper shortcuts (opt+h,j,k,l), even across tmux and nvim. Why would I give up on that?
  • timeforcomputer 1y ago
    Thanks for the link to tmuxinator, I had heard of it but never learned what it does. I think I'd like something like this. But I think this is a case of tmux providing a platform, I think the core idea of tmuxinator could be implemented outside of tmux, so tmux in that regard is basically an implementation detail. Then it is a pragmatic decision, using tmux you get to use the ecosystem of things like tmuxinator which explicitly target tmux to get a known number of terminal features like splits. What I learn from the OP, is that there are technical reasons that tmux is not a "good design" - like Kovid's comments on how it constrains innovation in terminal designs - which might lead someone to consider, what actually does tmux do and could my workflow be implemented otherwise? It might be a bunch of unixy hacks and tricks (as another commenter here said) but it can work. I'd imagine recreating something like tmuxinator would be hard though, but it could also be interesting, like having arbitrary GUI programs configured to appear in "splits" using tiling integrated seamlessly within the terminals. But yeah, if the workflow is already set up and serviceable and supported with a community, using tmux, then I'd just keep using it.
• zettabomb 1y ago
  The conclusion I come to from this is that yes, I actually do need tmux, as the alternatives proposed are far more annoying and provide no benefit. I don't have a need for graphics in the terminal, and frankly I find it odd that we wouldn't simply display graphics... with the graphics system. But I do have a need for seamless session persistence and multiple terminals, and I do enjoy splitting a window when I'm running a command on multiple servers.
• c120 1y ago
  I need "tmux" on remote linux machines that don't allow me to install "screen". If there's an easier way to keep a session running (and interactive) over internet disconnects, I have not found it yet
  • zeendo 1y ago
    If you can't install screen then I'm surprised you can install tmux - BUT if you can install wezterm then it solves this need nicely by adding sessions + multiplexing to the terminal emulator itself. https://wezterm.org/multiplexing.html https://wezterm.org/multiplexing.html
    • aragilar 1y ago
      tmux is probably already there (ubuntu always includes it), wezterm won't be. If I need to connect to a random machine, I first try tmux, then byobu, then screen. If one of those is not there it's most likely a fairly weak machine and so it's unlikely that anything can be installed on it.
• nobleach 1y ago
  Honestly, my only gripes with TMUX have been: 1. Having to zoom a window before copying multiple lines of text (Kovid brought this up in the interview that was mentioned in this article) 2. The weirdness of copying text from the scrollback buffer into the clipboard I've tried so many things for the second one over the years. I think I have it working okay-ish these days. But there are still plenty of times that I say, "aw screw it", and literally use the terminal's copy command. Every other solution to my multi-terminal workflow have been worse though! i3/bspwm with multiple terminals were okay. It was just hard to have "projects". I'd have to visit each terminal and switch to the proper directory, launch servers/docker-compose/etc. Zellij felt like too much "hopping out into manipulation mode, manipulating, then hopping back into work mode". Those milleseconds were enough to halt my flowstate. Single terminal with built-in tabs/splits felt clunky as I couldn't get the keyboard shortcuts into muscle memory (perhaps more time would help)
• gempir 1y ago
  Tmux prevents vendor lock-in but on Terminal level. It's so established and standard that everyone knows they need to support it, which is great. I don't need my terminal do display pictures, render video or whatever crazy features they come up with next, I want a solid base with the essentials. The rest the Operating system applications can probably do better anyway. VLC, MPV, Apple Preview IrfanView etc. That's why I love Alacritty, no fuss, no overcomplication. The basics, fast and stable.
• jdbernard 1y ago
  I don't use tmux because I have to. I use it because I love the way it works. The issues the author of the article and Kovid Goyal raise are not issues for me in practice. If something is built that better suits my needs, I'll be happy to switch. I am particularly sympathetic to Goyal's gripes about the performance/resource wastes of a multiplexer. But I also take issue with statements like "terminal multiplexers are a bad idea, do not use them, if at all possible" (from the kitty FAQ and the YouTube video linked in the article). Tmux solves a number of real problems for me that Kitty doesn't. Kitty also seems to be moving in a direction that I am not interested in. It's tied to a windowing system when I want a terminal that I can use headless. Even with the hacky workarounds the article mentions, it doesn't really support session persistence when I use this feature of tmux weekly. It introduces a lot of features that are likely to lead to visual noise when the constraints of text-only are one of the main reasons I like terminals (personally I don't want images in my terminal, full stop). Now, all of this is fine. It's the other statement, "[tmux acts] as a drag on the ecosystem as a whole, making it very hard to get any new features," that causes it all to rub me the wrong way. The only reason you feel like tmux acts like a drag is because there are users like me who won't switch to something like Kitty if it doesn't support tmux. So don't worry about us. Build a new thing that is not backwards compatible and live with the fact that many people won't use it. If you really want to drive the ecosystem forward as a whole, be less condescending about real use-cases that bring benefit to real users. To be clear (because text is a limited medium), I'm not grumpy, angry, or against Kitty because of this. But I am dismissive.
• FergusArgyll 1y ago
  > Another example is buffer scrollback. It's one of those things where you have to learn the tmux way of scrolling a window. You get used to it, of course, but it's just not great. And what about mouse select to copy/paste? It works most of the time, but sometimes tmux gets ignored and I'm selecting across splits which makes the thing I'm copying impossible to grab without bailing. funny, those things make me use tmux! My 2nd laptop is a debian terminal-only laptop (it's very old), the mouse doesn't work so the only way to copy paste is tmux (or screen probably but I never learned it) For me, tmux is not replaceable
  • sigwinch 1y ago
    tmux capture-pane - | vim - is a bit more comfortable than the mouse scroll wheel.
• tpoacher 1y ago
  Don't use tmux. Use a nice wrapper for tmux instead (e.g. like byobu). Otherwise complaining about tmux and talking about hacky workaround alternatives is a bit like complaining about the internet and advocating for the telegraph as a hacky alternative because you don't like writing your own HTTP requests by hand and morse code is so much simpler. Having said that, if really all you want is pane splits / window management, lots of terminals have their own solutions for this. Guake is a good one. disclaimer: I use Guake and still prefer to just use tmux (byobu) from Guake
  • em-bee 1y ago
    does guake support multiple sessions? remembering window layout through restart? or easily configurable startup layout?
    • tpoacher 1y ago
      Yes to all, with caveats, since Guake is a GUI terminal, not a multiplexer. Sessions yes, but not in the ssh / surviving-restart sense. But within the same login, yes, because it's a drop-down terminal which stays open in the background at all times even when exited, and thus running jobs don't get killed when you exit. And you can have multiple windows, and split-panes within windows. These are obviously remembered when toggling the terminal on/off. Startup layout and specific (remembered) configurations etc can be configured via hooks at start / show events. Guake events (e.g. splitting / toggling) can be triggerred externally / programmatically via normal cli commands, so you could either add hooks, or bind keys / commands to performing batch actions (such as loading a preferred window layout with specific programs etc).
• finaard 1y ago
  If you're using kitty and have terminal related problems the easiest solution usually is just not using kitty.
• scudsworth 1y ago
  very interesting. im going to continue using tmux instead of doing any of that.
• jollyllama 1y ago
  You lost me at nohup.
• sbinnee 1y ago
  My fingers are just too used to tmux and I can do all I want to do. But I hear the scroll issue. When I have to copy multiple chunks, I have to go to cp mode visual a chunk and as soon as I enter tmux goes to the bottom line and I have to scroll up again…
• GNOMES 1y ago
  I have been tempted to drop tmux locally for native Ghostty panes/tabs, but I prefer the single height tmux status bar with window list only (set -g status-left '' + set -g status-right '') vs the thicker window decorations using macos-titlebar-style = tabs. I did come up with Ghostty bindings to replicate my tmux settings if it helps anyone (my tmux leader is ctrl + space): # clear default bindings + add paste back keybind=clear keybind=super+v=paste_from_clipboard # navigate panes keybind=ctrl+h=goto_split:left keybind=ctrl+j=goto_split:bottom keybind=ctrl+k=goto_split:top keybind=ctrl+l=goto_split:right keybind=ctrl+space>shift+apostrophe=new_split:down keybind=ctrl+space>shift+five=new_split:right keybind=ctrl+space>space=equalize_splits keybind=ctrl+space>z=toggle_split_zoom # navigate tabs keybind=ctrl+space>c=new_tab keybind=ctrl+space>one=goto_tab:1 ... keybind=ctrl+space>zero=goto_tab:10
  • radicality 1y ago
    Nice, I came up with something similar when trying ghostty. Were you able to replicate/setup continuous key hold for resizing? The way I have it it tmux is that doing leader,Shift+hold h/i/k/j continually resizes a pane while I keep holding for example Shift+h. But I wasn’t able to replicate it in ghostty
    • GNOMES 1y ago
      Never realized you can do that. Can you share that tmux binding? Right now I use `bind -r Space next-layout` for resizing (spam repeatedly).
      • radicality 1y ago
        Hey. Not sure what's triggering it from the tmux.conf, i think it's just the `-r` like you have ? I think it stands for 'repeat'. Perhaps you are already doing the same thing, spam resize? I have something like `bind -r H resize-pane -L 1`, so when I hit my <leader> and then hold capital H (shift+h), it just keeps resizing by 1 unit of size. other parts of my config that could be relevant, using with iterm2. ``` bind h select-pane -L bind j select-pane -D bind k select-pane -U bind l select-pane -R bind -r H resize-pane -L 1 bind -r J resize-pane -D 1 bind -r K resize-pane -U 1 bind -r L resize-pane -R 1 set -g mouse on bind \\ split-window -h -c '#{pane_current_path}' bind - split-window -v -c '#{pane_current_path}' set -g focus-events on setw -g aggressive-resize on set -g display-time 4000 set -s escape-time 0 ```
• tiffanyh 1y ago
  Reminder: terminal multiplexers (like TMUX, Zellij, and Screen) are terminals too — even if often overlooked as such. So, if your multiplexer lacks support for certain features, it will limit functionality in advanced terminals like Kitty or Ghostty.
• dankobgd 1y ago
  I don't need much. I tried zellij but i couldn't stick with it. I either had to lock/unlock or change keybinds which is also annoying. Now i use ghostty and i can create new splits, tabs and i know few shortcuts to move around and resize and that's it.
  • imcritic 1y ago
    But Zellij supports tmux hotkeys.
  • yoyohello13 1y ago
    Zellij now has a mode that uses a leader key style. So no need to lock/unlock.
• jrm4 1y ago
  Obviously, different ways for different folks -- I never got into tmux, but perhaps relatedly, what I want is a well thought out and stable terminal/GUI filemanager hybrid thing; e.g. I can either "cd" or just click where I want to go, etc. I've seen half done implementations of this but nothing comprehensive?
  • layer8 1y ago
    What would happen when you click on a directory (I’m assuming you’re imagining a directory tree on the side in a separate pane) while some CLI program is running? Run the corresponding cd when the program exits and returns to the shell?
    • jrm4 1y ago
      Yes, but I'm imagining that this isn't something that works in conjunction with another terminal program, but that it's one program -- some kind of shell/GUI hybrid. I have actually seen this before, in the very fun but silly and not-particularly-useful edex-ui thing. (great way to impress people who don't know, but like, if you type your password in it it literally shows the keystrokes) https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui
• t_mahmood 1y ago
  Why would one go through so much trouble when you have tmux? But I really want Vim to color properly in it, can anyone give me the right solution?
  • homebrewer 1y ago
    Have you tried setting 'termguicolors' in vimrc? https://vim-jp.org/vimdoc-en/options.html#'termguicolors' https://vim-jp.org/vimdoc-en/options.html#'termguicolors'
    • t_mahmood 1y ago
      I had it, but it was not working. BUT I got it to work! Apparently I had my tmux setup wrong Changing to this fixed the colors on tmux. Hopefully this help someone in the future. # tmux colors set -g default-terminal "xterm-256color" set -ag terminal-overrides ",xterm-256color:Tc" Got it from here https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/3608#issuecomment-849074042 https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/3608#issuecomment-84907404...
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  I was in the same boat then I discovered this thing called a GUI and inside this GUI I could use this thing called tabs. It was revolutionary technology. It’s just too bad I suffer from a lack of common sense and insistence on trying to believe that all archaic terminal text based tools are better than anything else. I’m a developer and developers have insight on the best UI and we know that terminals are better than anything in the known universe. If you use a mouse you’re an ass hole.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • z0r 1y ago
    I too also don't understand other people's workflows but believe I know the best way to interact with a computer.
    • ninetyninenine 1y ago
      Agreed. Stupid people with stupid opinions don’t exist. Everyone’s opinion is valid. We must be inclusive of people with bad and wrong ideas. All criticism is wrong because saying someone’s workflow isn’t good will hurt their feelings. Useful debate on the merits of anything is a pointless endeavor because all varying opinions are valid. There is no best, better or worse… just everyone’s freedom of opinions. In my opinion eating lead is good for you and using a mouse and clicking on tabs hinders my efficiency by 300 percent. That’s my opinion! And it’s valid! I am valid!
  • em-bee 1y ago
    not appreciating the snark. tmux does way more than being an alternative way to get tabs.
    • ninetyninenine 1y ago
      Ok. No snark. Sessions, tabs, windows, tiling . All done in GUIs and done better. Tmux is good when you have no gui. But all this endless getting square pegs to fit in a round hole is what causes the snarks. Like you want to draw windows? Let’s use terminal characters instead of lines! Makes perfect sense. I find it incredulous that a lecture had to get this guy to realize what’s wrong with tmux and he still doesn’t see that this problem can be avoided by using a gui. He still goes for terminal abstractions. GUI is an obvious solution. But this guy is blind.
• aidenn0 1y ago
  [edit] The below is fixed (https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool/pull/213/files https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool/pull/213/files) upstream already, but is pending a release. I never heard of shpool, so just tried it. shpool completely breaks my PROMPT_COMMAND because it assumes that each word (in the shell sense) is a separate command. My PROMPT_COMMAND included "history -a" thus causing it to run "history" and "-a" on every prompt, making things quite unusable. It's quite maddening because all they had to do was write a lot less code to fix it: eval "${SHPOOL__OLD_PROMPT_COMMAND}" Would run the old prompt command just nicely instead of the much longer: for prompt_hook in ${SHPOOL__OLD_PROMPT_COMMAND}; do ${prompt_hook}; done;
• yoyohello13 1y ago
  I highly recommend zellij if you’re looking for a newer multiplexer. It give a bunch of tmux features but without some of the legacy baggage.
• eawgewag 1y ago
  I only use tmux for one reason -- for a script that setups my local server and runs backend/frontend/etc If there's a better way, I'm open to it. As of right now Claude can't vibe code me a script that opens two ghostty tabs, so tmux it is
• deadbabe 1y ago
  If I could just figure out how to scrollback in ghostty I probably wouldn’t bother with tmux.
• jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  Tmux has definitely caused me some pain too. I'm mostly back now (semi alas) but for a while I was using shpool adjacent dtach to leave nvim sessions running even if I logout. If I was doing things on the terminal, it would be inside an nvim terminal window. My workflow is project oriented, and I have to juggle multiple projects. So I wrote a small script to let me quickly either attach to an existing dtach session for a project by name, or to start a dtach+nvim session for a project. Also included some fun wildcarding, so I didn't have to type the full name of the project out, could just type some letters and hit enter. https://github.com/jauntywunderkind/dtachment https://github.com/jauntywunderkind/dtachment I don't see change as likely, but it does strike me as absurd that although I had gotten rid of tmux as a redundant window management system, I still had both the OS and nvim's window management going. The author talks about how things would work over ssh, but ideally to me, I could ssh in, forward some ports, and start some new terminal emulators that open multiple nvim clients that attach to a persistent perhaps headless nvim session.
• cogman10 1y ago
  I'm by no means a tmux power user, but it does have really nice features for when I need it. The primary usecase I've had for it is I can kick off 1 or multiple long running jobs, exit, and then come back later and checkout the various stdout logs to see how it worked. Could I accomplish the same thing with a bunch of stdout pipes, disown, fg, ctrl-z, etc? Sure. However, tmux makes it really easy to do that and then quickly switch around sessions to see how things are going. In the simplest workflow, it looks like this tmux longcommand() ctrl + B D and later tmux -a to checkout and see what's gone on with the command long after I disconnected with ssh.
  • ziml77 1y ago
    I think it's good practice to always start tmux immediately after opening an SSH connection. You might not know a command is long-running until after you start it. And you never know when you connection will just randomly drop. If you're using tmux it's never a big deal when that happens.
    • aragilar 1y ago
      I think it's notable that when ubuntu runs an upgrade it starts a tmux session for this reason.
• bitbasher 1y ago
  This blog post reminds me of _why_ I use tmux. Did you see how much they needed to do to even resemble the workflow of tmux? Jeez, just use tmux. I don't mind dealing with wonky copy and paste once in a while. > In summary: multiplexers add unnecessary overhead, suffer from a complexity cascade, because they actually have to translate escape codes, modifying them in hackish ways to get them to work with their concepts of windows/sessions. What does that have to do with you using tmux? You're not the one maintaining tmux's codebase.
  • Skunkleton 1y ago
    > I don't mind dealing with wonky copy and paste once in a while. This problem is in no way unique to tmux. You have the same problem with any terminal app that takes over drawing, eg vim. That said it is also easy enough to fix. The solution is OSC52, a terminal escape sequence that the emulator can use to interact with the system clipboard (kitty, alacritty, iterm2 all support this). The first step is to get you a script that writes out data in that protocol. Its easy enough: #!/usr/bin/env python3 import os, base64, sys clip = base64.b64encode(sys.stdin.buffer.read()) for pid in (os.getpid(), os.getppid()): # so that osc52-copy can be invoked by processes that themselves do not have a tty. cty = f"/proc/{pid}/fd/1" try: fd = os.open(cty, os.O_WRONLY) if os.isatty(fd): os.write(fd, b'\x1b]52;c;') # the actual escape sequence os.write(fd, clip) os.write(fd, b'\a') break except: continue finally: os.close(fd) else: raise SystemExit(f"no tty") Now you can do this: $ grep my_thing < some.txt | osc52-copy And whatever got into osc52 is now on your system clipboard. Tmux (set -g clipboard on) and nvim (unset clipboard) both have native osc52 support, and the script above can be used to integrate other places.
    • tristan957 1y ago
      What is the benefit of this over pbcopy and wl-copy?
      • larntz 1y ago
• hollowonepl 1y ago
  I just browsed through to realize that this is not criticism to tmux very existence. It’s just author found his own ways. That’s OK. I was once screen user, tmux extends that, but comes with emacs keyboard combos like if I was doing Mortal Kombat fatality trick for a simple thing and I personally found zellij more user friendly to me, unless I launch my linux box with i3 where all that is basically replaced by a quite interesting compositor. Point is… there are many ways to solve a problem… finding one that works for an individual doesn’t automatically create religious dogma… unless one wants to be internet famous for 72h and then forgotten until another dopamine shot hits.
• skeptrune 1y ago
  This sounds strictly more complicated than just using tmux.
• anthk 1y ago
  TMUX supports sixels just fine. It's a damn standard, and you have it at OpenBSD's base. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Also, tmux new-window does wonders with software spawned from sfeed, sacc and who knows how many TUI/CLI tools. You open your RSS feed list with sfeed, read the whole page with C under 'less', and if there are images, you can spawn Links in another page with 'o'.
• elzbardico 1y ago
  All good points relating to friction points with tmux. But, I am not an uber-elite-geek and Zellij is a good enough compromise to me. It gives me the things I am too lazy to solve by myself like tmux, with a lot less pain points.
• ho_schi 1y ago
  I keep using GNU Screen * Scrolling on TTY (Linux itself doesn’t support this for some years) * Window-Tabs on TTY, Wayland, SSH * Sessions * Copy/Paste I’m not using ZelliJ or Tmux because I don’t need more features and I know the shortcuts. I’m fine and don’t need weird workarounds. This article even confirms my decision! Would love some good C developers helping the Screen people.
• slim 1y ago
  If your main issue is session persistance you should try using mosh
  • em-bee 1y ago
    mosh doesn't allow you to reconnect to an old session if you restart the client or connect with a different one. tmux/screen do.
• samgranieri 1y ago
  I’ve migrated from tmux to zellij. And I’m playing around with omarchy and am really digging the tiling window manager feature
• f4ce63f3 1y ago
  Are you serious? Press "<Enter>~." into your ssh window. Do you think ssh isn't interpreting escape codes either for some reason?
• 5pl1n73r 1y ago
  > Further, I'm slowly noticing things that tmux didn't handle well, but now, "just work": native scrollback, terminal notifications, and terminal titles being the most notable changes. You can make tmux's OS window title and its internal window titles be whatever you want: Add "set -g set-titles" to ~/.tmux.conf. To test without changing the config, type `^B : set -g set-titles`, and to restore it back to default, `^B : set -gu set-titles`. This will be useful but overly verbose. It can be configured further. For example, `set -g set-titles-string "tmux | #{pane_title}"` will make it contain the title set by the shell (for PS1, I just make it set the current directory with `\w` or `\W`). Then, to make tmux's window titles (so, what will show up in the "window list") also be named after the current directory, you can use `set -g automatic-rename-format "#{pane_title}"`.
• NoSalt 1y ago
  I host a Minecraft server at my house; tmux is great for this: 1. Log in to the physical server. 2. Start a named tmux session. 3. Run the Minecraft start script (log messages start populating) 4. Ctrl + b ... d Now, whenever I need to do something with the server, I just attach back to the session and do it.
  • tetha 1y ago
    Interesting. Do minecraft servers have an interactive shell when they are running?
    • PhilipRoman 1y ago
      They do, if you type something like `stop`, it's equivalent to typing `/stop` in the in-game chat. In my scripts I set stdin to a named pipe, to be able to send commands later.
    • NoSalt 1y ago
      Yes ... you can white/blacklist users and IP addresses, change server.properties and reload the properties without restarting the server, kick players, message all players. All kinds of nice features.
• lou1306 1y ago
  > "You might not need tmux" First step, reimplementing the (arguably) one essential thing tmux provides, i.e., persistence: all tools have "varying degrees of success" and "are buggy". Scrollback? In tmux you "have to learn the tmux way", with the alternatives you might have it if you're lucky. I went into the post with an open mind but I don't think I will be ditching tmux anytime soon...
• qalmakka 1y ago
  I've been a decade long of tmux (I have switched to Zellij a few years ago though) and I don't give a damn about missing terminal features, I have Alacritty set-up to automatically spawn and attach to Zellij so I can close and reopen my terminal window whenever I want without ever losing the current state. Copy and paste is also arguably less wonky on Zellij compared to tmux
• cryptonector 1y ago
  No, sorry, no.
• meitham 1y ago
  The author of Kitty, Kovid Goyal, calls running tmux on local sessions an “anti-pattern” in the linked GitHub issue. I can’t help but find that a bit ironic, because the very first time I tried Kitty, I was in the middle of work when I discovered Arabic support was broken - https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/536 https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/536 . I simply launched the macOS Terminal app, attached to the same tmux session, verified my Arabic text rendered correctly, and then closed Kitty. Without tmux, I would’ve been forced to recreate my entire workflow from scratch.
  • weevil 1y ago
    Anyone calling anything an anti-pattern without evidence always sounds to me like 'I don't like how you do this, but I need to find a more cerebral way of describing that so I don't sound like a child.'
    • kzrdude 1y ago
      We has elaborated quite well on the why, so that's unnecessary.
  • em-bee 1y ago
    it may become an anti pattern once kitty implements all the features tmux has. it appears wezterm did that. if that's the goal, then i am all for it.
• zidoo 1y ago
  I read the whole thing, but I have a rule: I stop reading any review that includes “huge fan of <any_software>.” Like many things in life, getting too emotional isn’t usually helpful. :) I really do appreciate that younger generations are eager to write new software and push things forward — but reinventing lukewarm water isn’t the way to go. And yet, here we are, deep into the era of exactly that. That said, it seems like Kitty and tmux are actually quite different tools after all.
• WhyNotHugo 1y ago
  My usage of tmux gradually dwindled when I started using i3wm/sway. I really needed spilt and tabbed windows. My window manager does that for me, and I can mix terminal windows and browser windows and windows of any other non-terminal program. I group windows on different workspaces. I only need a few, I have up to ten configured, but could have infinitely more if needed. I still use tmux for window persistence or remote servers. For me, that's a very infrequent use. Not even once a week.
• aranw 1y ago
  I’ve tried tmux several times over the years and it has just never worked for me I’ve always struggled to remember all the keyboard shortcuts necessary for tmux or nvim or similar apps. I really like the look of shpool though cause I’d love to be able to log into a server and get back to where I left off
  • giancarlostoro 1y ago
    The one time I used it for dev work I had a basic bee shell script that would recreate a really basic setup for me on it and I would launch the things once on it. I found tmux easier than other options at the time. Every command can be scripted out so when you are in tmux you only have to worry about navigating. It definitely had quirks with vim and stuff though.
• jc_sec 1y ago
  You'll have to rip tmux from my cold dead hands
• blikdak 1y ago
  I dunno what mess they got into with basic tumx use but yeah, just re-assign your ctrl^ key between local and remote and change your cursor and border colour you are fine. Scrollback on Windows, even using Terminal or Putty is, to me, a fail. Tell me 'cause it's a huge problem for me.
• StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  That could be retitled “How I lost two days trying to configure shpool to land on something inferior to what I used before because a random interview on the internet convinced mr I needed to change something which worked perfectly and I have a lot of time to waste.” Honestly, there is absolutely no point in removing tmux from your workflow if you already use it. Multiplexers work. Sure they add complexity to the stack but so what? It works. It’s light. It adds virtually no security risk. The need to remove them comes from a purely ideological point of view. There is absolutely no practical advantage.
• ernestohegi 1y ago
  The thing I love about tmux the most is being able to navigate between multiple terminals with my keyboard, do they talk about this? How can it be done without tmux?