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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

One issue I have with tmux is that you can't resize the window to the current device. The developers seems to be very adament that it isn't implemented.

Currently tmux will adapt the size to the smallest (on each axis) client. This doesn't work well with persistent connections from a phone and PC since they typically have quite different window sizes.

In screen I hit ctrl-a + F to resize to current client and I miss it every time I use tmux.

Unfortunately I still prefer tmux, worth trying out if you haven't!

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Maybe I'm not understanding, but if you attach to a tmux session with the -d flag, it will detach the session from any other clients and resize it to the window you're using.

Yes, and maybe that is the reasonable thing to do, but I don't want to detach.

When an application queries the screen size from ncurses or some other lib, what value do you expect it to get?

I don't think it's a reasonable requirement.

I'm very happy with screens implementation. It will stick to the size of the first client and you override it at will in any other client or if you want to update the size (maybe you changed the size of the window).

Oh, that's reasonable. Sorry.

I'm curious about your setup and why you wouldn't want to detach smaller screens.

I don't want to detach my desktop just because I want to check current status on my phone. Maybe I have two sessions on two computers and I, temporarily for a few commands, want to go fullscreen. With tmux I have to detach the other client(s), go fullscreen, and when done I have to reattach the client(s). This for something that takes a command to adapt and again recover in screen.

It is just an inconvenience, nothing huge, but big enough to obstruct my flow.

Curious. What do you do with tmux on phone?

Anything I do on my desktop that the mobile keyboard allows for (conveniently), I attach to the same sessions. But the most common one is IRC. And for that I still use screen just because of this issue (I always have IRC attached on several clients).

This still hasn't been fixed? I checked out tmux 7 or 8 years ago and this was the pain point that tipped the scale from "it's just as good as Screen and it doesn't have all the hardware terminal emulation code I will never use" to "it breaks a workflow for me, I'll check it out later".

What should happen for the smaller client then? Just show a cropped part?

Yes, anchored to the left-bottom. Still very usable for light work in many cases and you can follow along. And if it isn't a quick ctrl-a + F and you are all set.

This also prevents one session over multiple displays with different orientations/resolutions.

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