Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

So this may mark me out as different, but apart from persistent remote connections, I've never really felt the need for screen/tmux.

I've been trying to figure out what the fuss is about, and I still really don't understand (apart from persistence and screen sharing.)

When I want multiple terminals, I just fire up another terminal window and hey presto, jobs a goodun. I have a fairly high res screen and small fonts, so I can fit many terminals on one screen. If I run out, I hop over to a new virtual screen.

Perhaps this is a by product of working in linux/unix so long? I can imagine that if I was forced to use putty, where connection setup is costly and screen space scarce, I'd want tmux to make things quicker.

What am I missing?

View on HN

Vim + tmux with custom bindings makes moving between vim and a terminal seamless. The same keystrokes for moving between panes in vim can be used to move to tmux panes. Also, as a vim user I loathe to reach for the mouse, so having quick and easy keybindings for launching and arranging tmux panes is great and preferred to the imperfect and slow arrangement using a mouse. Lastly, I can have tabs and window panes that are named and in consistent locations and persisted across sessions, so I can immediately jump around a dozen projects without much cognitive load. Try having 15 terminals open and remembering which is which and you'll find there is a high context switch cost, so you constantly have to close and open terminals. This isn't the case with tmux.

Hey, I contributed to that script! I love it to death.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/22ixkq/navigate_around...

Another way to think about tmux is that it frees up text editors like Kakoune [1] from having to deal with window management.

[1] Discussed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10484653

Same boat here.

Vim + tmux definitely helps with managing loads of things.

Add w3m to the mix.

and ranger with plugins for PDFs and showing ASCII image previews :-)

What happens when you're remoted into another box? Multiple terminals is fine on local, but when you've SSHed into some remote, screen is your friend for managing multiple parallel sessions of work. (In addition, as you mentiond, to persistent sessions -- if you break off, you can always reattach to any of your sessions)

Its just never really been a problem, ssh'ing into remote boxes has literally no cost (I have auto complete hostnames, and sshkey pairs.)

for processes taking longer than a day normally need something like screen, however thats so rare, most things are run inside another execution environment(jenkins, render manager, grid engine/mesos etc)

The remote server I happen to do most of my work on right now has tmux installed, so I don't even need to bother with screen anymore (at least for now).

The problem with opening multiple terminals is that you will eventually be slowed down in your workflow. Say you want to switch to a particular terminal, and you have more than 10 terminals running. You either have to press CTRL+Tab a few times (5 times on average for 10 terminals), or switch using the mouse, both of which are slow.

Another problem is working remotely. If you connect to a remote server, and you need another terminal for that remote server, you must establish another separate connection. With a terminal multiplexer, you do not need that.

iTerm works with Cmd-[0-9] just fine.

I had this problem, although I found after I started using a tiling window manager that I gravitated back from screen (which I used obsessively) to workspaces with a fairly small (usually two, sometimes three) of xterms running. I might have a total of six running, but they're on three workspaces, and the workspaces are conceptually discreet.

Tab cycling through more than 3 terminals got to be very tedious, but it also often got to be more difficult with the multiplexer to remember the absolute ids of terminals (in cases where I was opening a bunch of them to debug a problem) than it was to visually spot the one I wanted when I had them grouped into workspaces whose ids have meaning to me.

The remote thing you mention definitely gets to be a nuisance; usually when I'm debugging a remote machine, I open an xmonad workspace and on it a couple of terminals. It feels chintzy to ssh twice, but it's also weird to go from one set of terminal selection commands (xmonad's) to another (tmux's).

Anyway this probably sounds like I'm disagreeing, I totally agree but the tiling WM's threw a wrench into my thinking about being able to absolutely select specific terminals.

openssh supports connection multiplexing. But I still love tmux even on local machine.

I have a small screen with my laptop so I can only fit one terminal. It's pretty handy to change terminals all the time. Also it's handy to have all the terminals I was using popup again when I'm rebooting my computer (tmux-ressurection)

I have a heavily-tweaked Tmux that uses a lot of custom bindings but also incorporates Powerline to make the status bar helpful and homely. I spend so much time in the terminal and only Tmux can really personalize it. It looks good, and it feels like a good place to work. It's no big deal, having the time, date, current song, weather etc all there to see, but it is a pleasure to have.

A terminal that be made to feel like /home? Oh yes!

You probably meant comely. At least, I think powerline is beautiful!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com