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tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen (github.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/librebyte@lemmy.ml
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[–] 4 points 1 month ago (14 children)

One thing I have never had answered: I'm already used to GNU screen. What does tmux bring to the table for me?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    There's a pretty good python module for talking to tmux sessions/windows/panes, etc. You can also use tmux to lay out terminals in a grid, or one big pane and some smaller ones, or some mid sized ones or whatever.

    If you're good with screen and happy with it you'd might as well stay with screen if only to not get key chords mixed up. I'd recommend tmux over screen to newbies. There are some decent screenshots of complicated tmux layouts on the internet. Depending on what i was doing I could see having a pane for giving input to a process, a pane for tail -f output or logging, etc., and a pane for btop to monitor resources.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Screen supports subdividing panes as well, though now I'm curious if tmux has better performance with panes. One issue I did have with screen was exactly that, having about 4-5 panes at once watching a process from different angles and I could tell it wasn't running at full speed until I split up the panes. That alone could be a reason to relearn some muscle memory.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    One thing I'm using has six tmux panes in a window, then another window that I forgot was running with two more panes, and that's just for that session. I haven't noticed any performance issues, but that could be workflow dependent.

    That alone could be a reason to relearn some muscle memory.

    In the before times when I was learning UNIX (ssh over dialup) screen was the confusing godsend that made it so my programs would stay running, but once I got reliable connections/workflows/some money to buy better stuff) I never really had a desire to go back and look at screen. Once I found tmux I really doubt I'll ever revisit screen. Ctrl+b," gives you a new pane "below" and Ctrl+b, % gives you a new pane to the right. Ctrl+b,w gives you a little menu for all the sessions/windows/panes you have in tmux. set -g mouse on in .tmux.conf to click the panes. Copy/pasting text isn't as easy as I'd like, but that's probably a skill/configuration issue on my part. Hope that helps.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    For me it was sending commands to named panes. Let me automate some pretty annoying apps that demanded to be run in an open console.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (5 children)

    Did you end up using send-keys for that?

    I've dealt with that kind of thing in the past, and one thing I wanted to do that I never found a good solution for was to make it so that a pane was "read only" in that it could be scrolled with a mouse, but accept key presses (with page up/down arrows doing scrolling as a stretch goal). Did you ever deal with that/find a solution?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (4 children)

    I've never tried scrolling with mouse but it does work with arrow keys and pgupdn.

    Yes to send-keys.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Scrolling with a mouse works, just not exactly the way I thought it would when I started using it.

    I started out with a shell script using send-keys, and eventually decided the python tmux library was a nice improvement.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    Nice. I wrap send-keys with a little perl script, I should look into that Python lib.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    It's not bad at all. It gets monumentally easier if you've named all your sessions and windows because it's just a .get() to look them up. Panes still have that thing where the panes can get renumbered inside a window, but still have the same internal immutable identifier underneath the hood, but you wind up with pane.send_keys(my_string, enter=True) which is well worth the learning curve IMO.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Tmux lets you run multiple panes with different shell instances in them and arrange them on the screen however you like, and different “windows” so you can group up panes like browser tabs. It’s a bit fancier and more versatile than screen but they’re both tools that do a similar job

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    • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I use tmux at work, it's glorious! I have to ssh into GCP, which has been nationwide compute availability and frequently drops SSH connections. Tmux saves my place for me, and acts almost like multiple tabs

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