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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 the
by 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 agoThat 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 agoMS 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 agoJust 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.)
- squigz 1y agoMacs must have some strange workflows that that's the only use for minimizing... I regularly minimize some applications when I want to focus on others.
- em-bee 1y agoyou can use workspaces for that. for comparison, gnome on linux doesn't even support minimizing windows any more. you move windows/apps that you don't want to use right now to a different workspace.
- foldr 1y agoMinimization on Mac is essentially a legacy feature. There’s rarely any reason to use it.
- layer8 1y agoOn Windows there are applications that minimize to the tray instead of remaining on the task bar. That’s my most common reason to minimize, so that it disappears from the task bar when not in use.
- sceptic123 1y agoJust CMD+TAB to your required app, then hit ↓ arrow and you get access to all your windows. Minimised windows appear at the bottom of the screen.
- anthk 1y agoWindowMaker under GNU/Linux and BSD was like that too... But, OFC, both WindowMaker and Mac OSX come from the same NeXT grandaddy...
- em-bee 1y agowell, windowmaker only copied the style, so it's more like a reverse adoption, not a descendant.
- anthk 1y agoNot just that, even if Wing Is Not GNUstep. It was built to host tons of GNUStep applications and their behaviour.
- em-bee 1y agoi have used WindowMaker but also the original NeXTstep for years, and WindowMaker's integration with GNUstep apps and its emulation of the NeXTstep interface always felt incomplete.
- mkl 1y ago> MS Windows has excellent multi window management with Alt Tab Win Tab etc. Far superior to others. If by "others" you mean Mac, okay, but KDE and some other Linux desktops are at least as good as Windows at this out of the box, and much more customisable.
- squigz 1y agoWindows has basic window and desktop management, but I would hardly describe it as excellent. Most tiling window managers would provide those features and then more.
- sceptic123 1y agoWhatever fits your mental model I suppose, but every window is accessible via keyboard shortcuts on the Mac too, it just needs a different approach.
- coldpie 1y agoDo you know if there is a way to quickly switch between only two individual windows in different applications? A very common paradigm for me is swapping between two windows, for example a terminal session for code editing and a browser window for reference. On Windows and most Linux WMs, this is just a quick alt-tab hit to toggle between the two most recently focused windows. As I know there is no way to do this on macOS without bringing _all_ the windows to the foreground, which is not what I want. This is my #1 complaint about macos, I'd be so happy if there is just some shortcut I'm missing to accomplish this.
- sceptic123 1y agoI'm pretty sure that's part of what stage manager is for — you can drag windows in the same stage and they operate how you want — but there's too much manual setup required for me to realistically suggest it as an alternative. There are a bunch of third party tools you can use though, [AltTab](1) is free and tries to replicate windows experience on Mac. [Raycast](2) has a Switch Windows command which also allows direct access to any window via the keyboard (bind to alt+tab if you like) amongst many other features. [1] https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ [2] https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/
- coldpie 1y agoYeah unfortunately my work doesn't allow 3rd party apps like that (a reasonable restriction, IMO).
- systoll 1y agoControl+F4 - ‘move focus to the active or next window’ is essentially that. (With the caveat that if your keyboard focus winds up on the menu bar or otherwise not on a window at all, control+f4 shifts focus back to the window, rather than switching windows. The main way to make that happen is with the other control-f-key shortcuts that no-one uses, though) If you’re going to use it I’d probably rebind it in the keyboard shortcuts settings.
- anthk 1y agoAlt-tab? You mean pressing win+w under CWM to fuzzy-find windows per title name, and then spawn it?
- bravesoul2 1y agoBut many terminals have tabs so if all you desire is more than one terminal open but not multiple ui windows there are other options. VSCode for instance!
- jefurii 1y agobyobu+tmux lets me log into a remote machine once and then have multiple named sessions/workspaces each having multiple named tabs. The sessions persist when I disconnect and are there when I reconnect the next day. Is that possible with terminal tabs?
- bravesoul2 1y agoThat's why the browser tabs analogy breaks down.
- kccqzy 1y agoI have come to believe that tab management is really the job of the window manager not individual apps. My window manager allows me to tile windows, or create tabs out of overlapping windows. The tabs can be from the same app or even different ones.
- sigwinch 1y agoMy tmux config has clickable tabs in one terminal.
- em-bee 1y agothat sounds interesting. there are a few terminals with tmux integration. which terminal are you using? could you share your config please?
- sigwinch 1y agoThis is on alacritty and Windows terminal. Look for the tmux config keys: # Show the status bar at the top set-option -g status-position top # Make the status bar always visible set-option -g status on
- em-bee 1y agoactually, the critical setting that matters is: set-option -g mouse on that makes the tabs clickable. works in every terminal i tried it in.
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago> I view "you might not need tmux" in the same way as "you might not need browser tabs". A big difference is that I can move two browser tabs into separate windows, or from separate windows into the same. The same is actually tree of top-level windows if your window manager can group windows into tabs. tmux tabs lack this flexibility.
- em-bee 1y agotmux can move windows from one session to another or to a new session. pretty much the way browsers move tabs around and create new windows. it can even have the same window in multiple sessions. i'd like to see a browser have the same (identical) tab in multiple windows.
- sarlalian 1y agoTmux absolutely can move panes between windows, including into their own new window. And can move windows between sessions.