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.
As someone who uses Linux on all my personal machines but has usually had to use a MacBook for work, tmux is also pretty useful as a platform- independent tool for me to reuse the same workflow without needing to worry about differences between the two. I use Alacritty on Linux, but when I've tried using it on MacOS, there have things that don't seem to work for me out of the box the same way they do in Linux (which I'm struggling to remember exactly at the moment, but I think one of them might have been the setting to have the window maximized on startup). Rather than spend time trying to tinker around on an operating system that I don't have any particular desire to use outside of just getting my work done, it's pretty nice to be able to use tmux on iTerm to get basically the same experience I do on Linux. From that perspective, having something like an entirely independent way of scrolling back in a session is a feature to me, not an annoyance.
A lot of these arguments against tmux seem like they're more relevant to someone developing a terminal rather than using it. It's fine for people working on their own terminals to decide they don't care to support it, but I don't really find the arguments convincing as something I should care about, and I'd personally just switch to another terminal with better support for it rather than stop using it.
I use a combination of mosh and screen for this. I only need to type something to get my session back, after a reboot. Changing networks or putting my laptop to sleep for days doesn't drop my sessions: https://www.grepular.com/Immortal_SSH_Sessions
I used mosh when my data plan plumetted to 2.7 KBPS (~ISDN/2G speeds).
I connected to a public Unix server and read news, IRC'ed, IM'ed and such like crazy.
Also, without being connected to a Pubnix, IRC and Gopher did it fine, the web with patience,
and the same with Gemini (gemini://gemi.dev has been really useful to read news and scrap a 95% of unneeded scripts and trackers from web sites).
Usenet was slow on fetching, but totally readable the next morning, and, better, offline.
Mosh is excellent. It lets remote sessions survive (well, automatically and transparently recover from) disruption that reliably kills ssh.
I basically don't use ssh at all any more for interactive sessions, because I'm sick of a few lost packets on wifi or a weak cell signal dropping my connections and forcing me to start over.
Tmux, I used to use and eventually abandoned. I decided I didn't need two keyboard-based window managers (I use Spectacle on Mac) and the one that was only for shells was the one that could go. I have replaced it with nothing, so far, aside from that I just open more Terminal.app windows now (I also used to use iTerm2, for years, until it dawned on me that I was using exactly nothing in it that's not also provided by Terminal.app, and the latter's got better input latency, so I was suffering an extra installed program and slightly less responsive typing for no reason at all)
Yes. Mosh is a seamless replacement for ssh, and screen is a mostly seamless replacement for tmux. One more level is Mosh+byobu, which is so useful I don't even bother with plain terminals most the time.
Haha I think you have the history backwards here. Tmux was created as a replacement for screen when it was 20 years old! Speaking as someone with ‘set -g prefix c-a’ in their .tmux.conf because my muscle memory is so used to the screen hotkeys.
Hey maybe I do! Great to learn the history here. Regardless, my point is that Byobu is very nice compared to either. That may now be lost due to my careless comment.
On mobile so I’m not sure which case OSC52 applies to, but I use mosh+tmux 8-10 hours a day. Both bracketed paste and tmux selection setting local clipboard work fine
I ran into so many little annoying color and font issues with vim, tmux and iTerm2 that I gave up on tmux (for local work). What small benefit I got from tmux on my local machine (basically surviving updates and a little more session persistence) I rarely miss.
I wanted it to be better, and might go back if I could figure out the font issues, but I just don't have the time right now.
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.
I just remapped the keys to ctrl-z after I swapped ctrl and caps lock. As you'd never suspend stuff under tmux for obvious reasons, you'll get the whole keyset for any cli/tui software.
Do you have links to any examples? I've searched for this on and off for years, and i use Wezterm, but i've never been able to make it work like i remember the iTerm2 integration working.
Would love for examples using Windows Terminal as well.
ITerm2 seems really cool, it has so many features. The developer(s?) must be really productive, they churn it out. They support a lot of Kitty protocols for example.
Ghostty has infrastructure to support it from my understanding, like Mitchell did the initial plumbing. It just takes a spirited individual to finish it up.
I've just now learned about tmux's control mode. Can you explain what that tmux -CC command does? I use `ssh -t <host> tmux attach -d` from bash history to (re)establish my remote tmux session. `new -A -s 0` would do the about same thing, I just don't see how -CC is supposed to work here.
Edit: It appears to be related to iterm2's tmux integration. Neat.
Wow, I was wondering if e.g. Ghostty could implement something like this but that's cool it's already proven out.
Does everything still go "through" tmux (so parsing etc. is still done twice), or does iTerm handle most of the rendering and just delegate scrollback storage/session persistence to tmux? The latter seems like the best of both worlds.
Tmux cc mode doesn't work over mosh. Something to do with how it mangles binary going over the wire. Breaks other iTerm2 features like local copy paste from remote paste boards, drag and drop uploaf and download
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.
> 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.
Terminal emulators have taken a very odd attitude toward OSC52. Many (or all?) of them selectively disable either copy, or paste, or both, depending on how cautious the maintainer is.
Yes, it's true that an application that can read system clipboard content may scrape a password, but literally any application running in the terminal can read private keys out of your .ssh folder.
With some heavy reading and a bit of experimentation, you can usually get this working, though.
But with OSC 52, any system I ssh into can scrape those passwords. Bigger attack surface, to be sure. And unfortunately there’s no particularly good way of telling if the received escape code originated from the local machine.
I generally use xclip to copy program output. It has been around forever. Otherwise, I pipe into vim or I'm already using vim and I can copy via visual mode with "+y
If you're working locally I can't think of much. OSC52 works to copy to your local clipboard from a remote system (e.g., over ssh) from within tmux or nvim as long as you are using a terminal that supports it.
I use it to copy from remote system when I'm in nvim (`"+y`).
Here are a couple links that relate to tmux and nvim.
The benefits it works everywhere, even on the blink app on iPhone when you suddenly have to pull out your phone in an emergency, connect to your tmux session away from your usual workstation.
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.
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.
Yup, another fun thing to do w/ this: let Claude Code talk to and control Gemini CLI, OpenCode, other CC instances, etc. in interactive mode! A different flavor of subagent. :)
Do you find the tmux-cli wrapper to improve results?
I tell Claude to use the existing tmux CLI to send-keys, capture-pane, etc. and it works flawlessly. Literally just "never use the Bash tool, run all commands in tmux sessions" and it knows what to do from there.
One other thing I found is that when it spawns another Claude in a pane, and sends it a message, the enter key doesn’t register if sent immediately, so the other Claude doesn’t act on it. So in Tmux-cli I added a delay after experimenting with various values. I guess with plain Tmux it might run into this issue.
This is nice to know. I didn’t compare with plain Tmux but should. In Tmux-cli I set up some convenience functions and scaffolding to prevent accidentally killing itself etc. But yes if plain Tmux works well I would just use that; it’s one less context burden.
I'm reviewing the docs and interested in the scripting. I like that it uses python to script.
Could I have kitty send each line it receives to an external tool, say via HTTP?
I want to make a custom frontend to claude code, or any other CLI tool, and an obvious easy frontend is a web tool that communicates over HTTP, so getting claude wrapped in a HTTP control system seems like a good starting point.
I'm interested in whether things like "tmux capture-pane" which strips characters come from Kitty as well? Do I need to be cautious of control characters?
These are all great. If you need to do something more involved, pexpect is also worth mentioning. It's a reimplementation of expect in python that's easy to be productive with quickly.
I used it in a previous job to automate configuring thousands of network devices
> 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.
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.
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.
I asked what test suite they used to ensure they had the correct behaviour, and they were fairly dismissive, so I'm not sure what you're basing that on. I think they're far more interested in a specific set of features than getting things right.
How is this even possible? Just pipe result from a command into a file and open in vim and search it that way? Perhaps use Neovim's built in terminal where you can search at will? I find it hard to believe that "I don't ever search" is a thing.
I don't think I've ever intentionally used the scroll back search in iterm2 and deliberately disabled the shortcut for it because I kept triggering it by accident. I don't understand wanting or needing it, at all.
ironically, the last time i tried it in my normal workflow, it refused to interpret certain escape sequences... to the terraform cli application. i couldn't finish a `terraform apply` - i'd type `y` and hit enter but it would just print `^M`.
Oh yes, using a new terminal emulator instead of one which has been around for decades. What could go wrong? It's creator has been vocal that it's nothing more than a side project
I agree. It's also true of nearly any program. If you do not set its configuration properly, it may not work as expected.
In the case of TMUX, it can be a bit annoying because it's not immediately apparent _why_ things look wonky. But I'm not sure what the solution is. Default to 256 colors?
Indeed, the TERM environment variable actually is the configuration of "nearly any program" (excluding the ones that aren't doing explicitly terminal I/O, of course, and the bad ones that just ignore TERM and make assumptions). Set TERM wrongly, and one has set the configuration incorrectly for a whole load of programs, in one fell swoop.
> Setting TERM properly isn't some tmux-specific problem.
Correct, but it's another layer to deal with. There are `tmux` specific TERMs that should be used which sit on top of your terminal emulator TERM. This was my point: you have another layer that you need to be aware of when using tmux and when debugging.
> PLEASE NOTE: most display problems are due to incorrect TERM! Before
reporting problems make SURE that TERM settings are correct inside and
outside tmux.
> Inside tmux TERM must be "screen", "tmux" or similar (such as "tmux-256color").
Don't bother reporting problems where it isn't!
> Outside, it should match your terminal: particularly, use "rxvt" for rxvt
and derivatives.
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 . 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.
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.'
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.
> 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.
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:
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. (-:
My VT420 doesn't support hardware flow control, but software flow control does not play nice with many modern terminal applications. GNU Screen provides an extremely effective workaround, plus its other features. I've used tmux a lot on modern terminal emulators, but it seems to lack this important feature for vintage terminals. Glad that tmux solves your problems with broken apps that don't support termcap or terminfo.
Then you'll want to run this before starting tmux:
stty -iutf8 ixon
export LANG=en_US
I also recommend using a dedicated tmux socket with the VT to avoid accidentally connecting to an unpatched tmux server that helpfully re-disables flow control. That happened to me while I was testing the patch, and it was infuriating.
I've also hacked up support for storing tmux window contents in different pages of VT memory, so you can switch windows instantly without waiting for full screen redraws. It's a bit rough around the edges (doesn't handle split windows very well, for example), but it's enough of a quality-of-life improvement that I use it anyway. It's a bit long for a comment, but I can post it somewhere if you're interested.
Feel free to email me if you want more information about my setup.
Can I ask why? It starts slower (has a significant lag on old hardware), has way less useful features (like tabs), has the same responsiveness, and loses in benchmarks (for what they're worth). I see no reason to use it when kitty/ghostty/konsole/foot exist (depending on one's preferences), but people obviously do.
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.
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.
I 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.
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”
> 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.
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.)
On 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.
you 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.
Windows 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.
Do 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.
I'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.
But 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!
byobu+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?
> 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
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.
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?
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
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.)
> 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.
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
Nit: didn’t Ctrl-X/C/V come from the original Macintosh? I thought Windows initially followed IBM’s CUA, where cut / copy / paste are instead Shift-Delete / Ctrl-Insert / Shift-Insert (and those still work too).
The original Macintosh had Command-X/C/V, and Windows 3.0 adopted that in addition to the existing CUA shortcuts, but changed Command to Control, as Alt was already in use for menus and form control shortcuts on Windows. So it’s true that Ctrl+C for Copy only became a thing with Windows.
Apple provided a new modifier key (Command, or ⌘) for our GUI shell. Or Open Apple/Closed Apple if you go back to the Apple II days. Control still works like it should.
Microsoft said "Hey that's useful, but we don't make hardware, and we don't have a Command key, so let's break things and reuse Control in our copycat GUI, and ignore all of the historical uses of control characters. What could go wrong?"
And then Linux (Gnome??) said "Hey we don't make hardware either, let's do what Microsoft did, because lots of people are familiar with it, and even though the historical uses of control characters are really important on Unix-like operating systems."
> 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 & $PS2. You want to copy from vi into another window, you can't use the mouse - and you have to use a side channel.
I have 20+ unfixable issues outlined, and I'm in the process of writing a blog post... But at my current rate, it could become a book.
ok, yes, i was just talking about the simple case. you are right that the issue is more complicated, so i actually agree with you. i am talking about similar problems here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757142
i am looking forward to your post. i added your blog to my rss reader
I have been tempted to drop tmux locally for native Ghostty panes/tabs, but I prefer the single height tmux status bar with window list only (set -g status-left '' + set -g status-right '') vs the thicker window decorations using macos-titlebar-style = tabs.
I did come up with Ghostty bindings to replicate my tmux settings if it helps anyone (my tmux leader is ctrl + space):
Nice, I came up with something similar when trying ghostty.
Were you able to replicate/setup continuous key hold for resizing?
The way I have it it tmux is that doing leader,Shift+hold h/i/k/j continually resizes a pane while I keep holding for example Shift+h. But I wasn’t able to replicate it in ghostty
I've been a decade long of tmux (I have switched to Zellij a few years ago though) and I don't give a damn about missing terminal features, I have Alacritty set-up to automatically spawn and attach to Zellij so I can close and reopen my terminal window whenever I want without ever losing the current state. Copy and paste is also arguably less wonky on Zellij compared to tmux
I never heard of shpool, so just tried it. shpool completely breaks my PROMPT_COMMAND because it assumes that each word (in the shell sense) is a separate command. My PROMPT_COMMAND included "history -a" thus causing it to run "history" and "-a" on every prompt, making things quite unusable.
It's quite maddening because all they had to do was write a lot less code to fix it:
eval "${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;
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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) ;)
i have 5 tmux sessions with a total of 19 windows on my laptop, one of which contains a localhost ssh connection to a second account where i have another tmux session with half a dozen windows. not to mention the tmux sessions i have on my servers.
the key benefit is i only need to learn one set of commands to switch sessions and windows, and to create new windows.
the sessions all run in a single terminal window, so when i have multiple other windows, i don't have to switch between them to find the right terminal window. terminals have tabs, but they don't group tabs into sessions. a single terminal with 19 tabs would not work.
i use the gui to start the terminal. i would have to find out how to script starting a terminal with multiple tabs. tmux is more easily scriptable, and again, i can't avoid learning tmux, since i use it remotely, and so when using it locally too, i don't have to learn a different way for my local machine.
finally, although rarely needed, i can log out, or my gui can crash, but the tmux sessions survive. i can also connect to my laptop from a different device and attach to the tmux sessions that way.
for a gui terminal to replace tmux the foremost feature i need is for it to remember my windows and tabs, just like the browser does. i have not come across any terminal that does that (but i admit, i haven't done a exhaustive search either). gnome (or any WM) can remember which apps i have open, but it can't remember the state inside the apps.
being able to reproduce state is really the key. i have a few vim sessions for example, easily remembered and recalled from my command line history. i could use gvim if i could figure out how to connect a gvim window with a terminal such that they form one unit, because every vim session is connected a number of commandline operations. (i believe BeOS/haiku can potentially do that based on the way its window tabs work)
I don't use a tiling WM, and tmux[1] does an excellent job at the tiling features.
I do the majority of my work physically at a Linux (Fedora) desktop, but I also work from home SSH'd to that desktop. Being able to just attach to the same session and pick up where I left off, with all the same shell management, is great.
[1] I used tmux for years, but have very recently switched to Zellij. I find the pane navigation to be much smoother (and more discoverable).
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.
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.
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.
> 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}"`.
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?
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?
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)
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.
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…
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Zellij handles this, if you click and drag vertically within a pane the selection will stay in that pane even if there's a different pane to either side. Copy happens when you un-click. (Or at least it does this with Wezterm. I wouldn't be surprised if some terminals don't support whatever voodoo zellij is doing to alter the selection behavior).
You can't select arbitrary columns within a pane (like you can in vim) but if I'm understanding you that's not what you're after anyhow.
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.
> 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.)
Now that I’m looking at this again, I remember that the wl-copy (or xcopy or pbcopy) thing is a workaround for GNOME’s VTE terminal widget refusing to support the OSC 52 escape sequence for setting the clipboard. If your terminal emulator does speak that one, then you should be able to use the set-clipboard option[1] instead, which also has the advantage of working over a remote connection (because it’s in-band).
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
and finally, how do i switch sessions or tabs? no word about that on the multiplex page. or elsewhere.
fortunately, i found this article which describe an elaborate setup to make wezterm behave somewhat like tmux, with familiar keybindings. maybe i can get this to work: https://mwop.net/blog/2024-07-04-how-i-use-wezterm.html
oh, one last issue: there are no resize handles, or a titlebar, although according to the descriptions they should be there. where did they go?
When I first tried to port my tmux config to wezterm it took about a day to learn about all the wezterm concepts, map them to their tmux equivalents, and reach an mvp. I tend to be on the slower side to pick things up though.
Locally - I far prefer wezterm now. The only issue for me was that getting persistent server side sessions seemed to come at the cost of some weird neovim gui refresh and latency issues which I'm not sure are fully solved yet, so I still use tmux for that. Looking at the issue tracker, maybe I should try again, seems that at least some refresh issues have been addressed since I last checked https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/4607
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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!
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.
could be done, and i agree. but i have yet to find a terminal GUI that actually does.
tmux has a great and useful TUI. all the terminals i have tried so far, have a very minimal GUI. they have tabs, and some have panes that's about it. tmux works out of the box without any configuration at all. i can just build up my sessions interactively. i evaluated kitty a year ago, and i am testing wezterm now. neither are usable without having to manually write an elaborate config file, and neither include all the features that tmux has.
i would love to find a GUI terminal to replace tmux. but there isn't one yet. at least it looks like both wezterm and kitty are working on it. so maybe in a year or two there will be something that can actually compete with tmux. but until then it's just a wish.
> Sessions, tabs, windows, tiling . All done in GUIs and done better.
Sorry but no, really no.
Windows:
- Has two ways of swapping between windows, taking up 2/3 of my modifier keys for use with Tab
- Loves to offset windows by one pixel and resize my taskbar
- Irrevocably moves things around if I disconnect a monitor
- Flashes taskbar icons constantly, like a particularly badly behaved terminal bell
and Mac:
- Leaves zombie processes in the cmd-tab list
- Is philosophically incompatible with any kind of fullscreen workflow.
Both have:
- Slow animations for basic windowing
- Only a few tiling options
- Minimal configurability...
- ...which doesn't matter anyway, because if someone at HQ gets bored, you're getting a UI interface redesign that's incompatible with your current workflow
- An approach to tab dragging that induces seizuring windows, because things are just too slow and fickle
- The ability for anything to steal my focus, mid-typing
But what's most damning of all is that both have a wealth of popular tools written and used by people trying to wrangle them into something useable.
There is nothing I could do to make them as fast to use as my tmux based workflow, simply because they do not work quickly enough for the keypresses I'm entering and don't even appear to be deterministic.
Use different apps. Don't have to stick with the default OS window primitives. omfg. I use loop for macos.
So for some reason a terminal app where you can't even draw a proper line vertically across the screen... somehow the people who make apps for terminal are geniuses in making windowing UIs, more genius then people who want to work in pixels. I don't understand why.
And these complete geniuses are like, NO! I don't want to work with pixels. I want to use ascii characters to draw stuff that ONLY looks sort of like boxes, because that's the smarter thing to do!
And don't get me started on config files. What's better, a menu where I'm presented with all my options? Or a freaking config file where none of the options are presented and I have to look it up in a man page and then if I make a typo often it doesn't tell me there's a problem.
And likely you aren't even using that terminal app in a proper terminal. You're emulating a terminal underneath a GUI which is a huge performance penalty. Modern OS's present to you an advanced interface, but you're too elite to use it, so you EMULATE a primitive interface underneath the advanced interface.
Bro use linux and uninstall gnome or KDE. Throw that mouse into the trash. That's the common sense future of UI according to you?
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.
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.As someone who uses Linux on all my personal machines but has usually had to use a MacBook for work, tmux is also pretty useful as a platform- independent tool for me to reuse the same workflow without needing to worry about differences between the two. I use Alacritty on Linux, but when I've tried using it on MacOS, there have things that don't seem to work for me out of the box the same way they do in Linux (which I'm struggling to remember exactly at the moment, but I think one of them might have been the setting to have the window maximized on startup). Rather than spend time trying to tinker around on an operating system that I don't have any particular desire to use outside of just getting my work done, it's pretty nice to be able to use tmux on iTerm to get basically the same experience I do on Linux. From that perspective, having something like an entirely independent way of scrolling back in a session is a feature to me, not an annoyance.
A lot of these arguments against tmux seem like they're more relevant to someone developing a terminal rather than using it. It's fine for people working on their own terminals to decide they don't care to support it, but I don't really find the arguments convincing as something I should care about, and I'd personally just switch to another terminal with better support for it rather than stop using it.
I use a combination of mosh and screen for this. I only need to type something to get my session back, after a reboot. Changing networks or putting my laptop to sleep for days doesn't drop my sessions: https://www.grepular.com/Immortal_SSH_Sessions
Mosh is incredibly useful. I have sessions running from uptime until reboot with machines (pis and a desktop) on my local network from my laptop.
I leave with the laptop, return days later, and perform no manual intervention to reconnect. It's absolutely brilliant.
I used mosh when my data plan plumetted to 2.7 KBPS (~ISDN/2G speeds).
I connected to a public Unix server and read news, IRC'ed, IM'ed and such like crazy. Also, without being connected to a Pubnix, IRC and Gopher did it fine, the web with patience, and the same with Gemini (gemini://gemi.dev has been really useful to read news and scrap a 95% of unneeded scripts and trackers from web sites).
Usenet was slow on fetching, but totally readable the next morning, and, better, offline.
Mosh looks very cool, though I've never used it. Does Screen provide some advantage over tmux in this setup?
Mosh is excellent. It lets remote sessions survive (well, automatically and transparently recover from) disruption that reliably kills ssh.
I basically don't use ssh at all any more for interactive sessions, because I'm sick of a few lost packets on wifi or a weak cell signal dropping my connections and forcing me to start over.
Tmux, I used to use and eventually abandoned. I decided I didn't need two keyboard-based window managers (I use Spectacle on Mac) and the one that was only for shells was the one that could go. I have replaced it with nothing, so far, aside from that I just open more Terminal.app windows now (I also used to use iTerm2, for years, until it dawned on me that I was using exactly nothing in it that's not also provided by Terminal.app, and the latter's got better input latency, so I was suffering an extra installed program and slightly less responsive typing for no reason at all)
Yes. Mosh is a seamless replacement for ssh, and screen is a mostly seamless replacement for tmux. One more level is Mosh+byobu, which is so useful I don't even bother with plain terminals most the time.
Haha I think you have the history backwards here. Tmux was created as a replacement for screen when it was 20 years old! Speaking as someone with ‘set -g prefix c-a’ in their .tmux.conf because my muscle memory is so used to the screen hotkeys.
GNU screen was released in 1987.
tmux was created in 2007.
Hey maybe I do! Great to learn the history here. Regardless, my point is that Byobu is very nice compared to either. That may now be lost due to my careless comment.
Mosh does not support OSC52, so it's a barrier to getting copy/paste to work.
And case in point, mosh is another terminal layer, it's also a multiplexer of sorts.
I've used mosh a lot but it's just interesting to note it's in the same category as screen and tmux
On mobile so I’m not sure which case OSC52 applies to, but I use mosh+tmux 8-10 hours a day. Both bracketed paste and tmux selection setting local clipboard work fine
I ran into so many little annoying color and font issues with vim, tmux and iTerm2 that I gave up on tmux (for local work). What small benefit I got from tmux on my local machine (basically surviving updates and a little more session persistence) I rarely miss.
I wanted it to be better, and might go back if I could figure out the font issues, but I just don't have the time right now.
> vim, tmux and iTerm2
Interesting, I've been using exactly that combination for ... as long as tmux and iTerm2 have been around?
I am not aware of any color or font issues. What am I missing?
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.
I've always found screen's ctrl-a is so much easier to reach for than tmux's ctrl-b. I recommend re-mapping ctrl-b to ctrl-a
I use Ctrl-Space.
I find it a lot easier to type than either Ctrl-A or Ctrl-B.The real superpower prefix key is ` especially if you have a british mac keyboard.
Both C-a and C-b are so commonly used that I don’t like either of them. I ended up going with C-\ since I only rarely use that one.
I just remapped the keys to ctrl-z after I swapped ctrl and caps lock. As you'd never suspend stuff under tmux for obvious reasons, you'll get the whole keyset for any cli/tui software.
I'll bite. What's so obvious? I suspend jobs in bash all the time while using tmux.
Often TMUX it's for tasks you woudn't suspend. And, if any, you can just use kill -STOP and kill -CONT among other signals from another tmux pane.
Isn't the screen equivalent literally this?
Edit: I guess it's missing the iTerm integration> falling back to screen
So you're saying you're a masochist
Does any Linux terminal have a comparable integration? I'm still using GNU Screen but willing to give tmux another shot.
WezTerm
The author of this feature also ported it to the Windows Terminal.
Besides, Chrome OS’s built in terminal also has tmux integration.
Do you have links to any examples? I've searched for this on and off for years, and i use Wezterm, but i've never been able to make it work like i remember the iTerm2 integration working.
Would love for examples using Windows Terminal as well.
There was one called Terminator which had some tmux like features, split panes, broadcast, etc. It's not been maintained in a bit.
https://gnome-terminator.org/
I used to use terminator for a long time, but i've switched to tilix (https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/) with little pain.
I'll check it out.
Note: that Terminator I linked is a re-boot (I'll be back) so, I might give it another go as well.
wezterm
Pretty sure iTerm is the only term that implements that tmux protocol.
ITerm2 seems really cool, it has so many features. The developer(s?) must be really productive, they churn it out. They support a lot of Kitty protocols for example.
Ghostty has infrastructure to support it from my understanding, like Mitchell did the initial plumbing. It just takes a spirited individual to finish it up.
I use happily GNU Screen. Keep it?
I've just now learned about tmux's control mode. Can you explain what that tmux -CC command does? I use `ssh -t <host> tmux attach -d` from bash history to (re)establish my remote tmux session. `new -A -s 0` would do the about same thing, I just don't see how -CC is supposed to work here.
Edit: It appears to be related to iterm2's tmux integration. Neat.
You might not need control mode for that, try `autossh foo ‘tmux new-session -A’`
Wow, I was wondering if e.g. Ghostty could implement something like this but that's cool it's already proven out.
Does everything still go "through" tmux (so parsing etc. is still done twice), or does iTerm handle most of the rendering and just delegate scrollback storage/session persistence to tmux? The latter seems like the best of both worlds.
Composing simpler tools works better than complicated tools that try to solve everything.
I am a former Kitty user and current Ghostty user and hope Ghostty stays basic and good.
Would mosh stop you from having to reconnect to SSH at least after wake? You'd still need to reestablish a mosh connection after rebooting.
Tmux cc mode doesn't work over mosh. Something to do with how it mangles binary going over the wire. Breaks other iTerm2 features like local copy paste from remote paste boards, drag and drop uploaf and download
Then a nice addition is to save typing it each time
Better:
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.
> 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:
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.
Terminal emulators have taken a very odd attitude toward OSC52. Many (or all?) of them selectively disable either copy, or paste, or both, depending on how cautious the maintainer is.
Yes, it's true that an application that can read system clipboard content may scrape a password, but literally any application running in the terminal can read private keys out of your .ssh folder.
With some heavy reading and a bit of experimentation, you can usually get this working, though.
But with OSC 52, any system I ssh into can scrape those passwords. Bigger attack surface, to be sure. And unfortunately there’s no particularly good way of telling if the received escape code originated from the local machine.
I generally use xclip to copy program output. It has been around forever. Otherwise, I pipe into vim or I'm already using vim and I can copy via visual mode with "+y
What is the benefit of this over pbcopy and wl-copy?
If you're working locally I can't think of much. OSC52 works to copy to your local clipboard from a remote system (e.g., over ssh) from within tmux or nvim as long as you are using a terminal that supports it.
I use it to copy from remote system when I'm in nvim (`"+y`).
Here are a couple links that relate to tmux and nvim.
- tmux: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard
- nvim: https://neovim.io/doc/user/provider.html#clipboard-osc52
The benefits it works everywhere, even on the blink app on iPhone when you suddenly have to pull out your phone in an emergency, connect to your tmux session away from your usual workstation.
I am tired of seeing people creating problems out of nowhere. The reasons author gave are stupid and I am gonna question his "7+ years" of tmux usage
I think some people should just admit they love tinkering with their tools instead of saying it is for productivity or whatever.
> and I am gonna question his "7+ years" of tmux usage
Eh, lots of people use tools for ages without digging too deep.
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
https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-toolsThere 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.
> and found out that one of the nifty features is that it is scriptable, I.e allows programmatically sending keystrokes to a specific pane
In case anyone was curious, screen can do this too with the command "stuff" (read it as the verb like "stuffing something into a box").
Yup, another fun thing to do w/ this: let Claude Code talk to and control Gemini CLI, OpenCode, other CC instances, etc. in interactive mode! A different flavor of subagent. :)
Indeed, or vice versa where we leverage Gemini’s monster context length
Make sure you use the pipe operator.
Very cool ideas in this thread.
Do you find the tmux-cli wrapper to improve results?
I tell Claude to use the existing tmux CLI to send-keys, capture-pane, etc. and it works flawlessly. Literally just "never use the Bash tool, run all commands in tmux sessions" and it knows what to do from there.
One other thing I found is that when it spawns another Claude in a pane, and sends it a message, the enter key doesn’t register if sent immediately, so the other Claude doesn’t act on it. So in Tmux-cli I added a delay after experimenting with various values. I guess with plain Tmux it might run into this issue.
This is nice to know. I didn’t compare with plain Tmux but should. In Tmux-cli I set up some convenience functions and scaffolding to prevent accidentally killing itself etc. But yes if plain Tmux works well I would just use that; it’s one less context burden.
If you're interested in doing similar things but with a terminal, the Kitty remote control mechanism is pretty cool: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/remote-control/
I'm reviewing the docs and interested in the scripting. I like that it uses python to script.
Could I have kitty send each line it receives to an external tool, say via HTTP?
I want to make a custom frontend to claude code, or any other CLI tool, and an obvious easy frontend is a web tool that communicates over HTTP, so getting claude wrapped in a HTTP control system seems like a good starting point.
I'm interested in whether things like "tmux capture-pane" which strips characters come from Kitty as well? Do I need to be cautious of control characters?
> So it’s like Playwright/Puppeteer for the terminal
I mean, a tty is just a file descriptor... there have been script(1), expect(1) and chat(8) since the 80ies. tmux is not really necessary.
"tmux capture-pane" strips escape sequences that break the terminal and sets all the right variables; try using expect with e.g. neovim
You right, it's pseudo terminal needed. The module pty of python can do this
And screen(1) https://linux.die.net/man/1/screen
Don't forget tmux(1) https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki
er, the context in this subthread is tmux alternatives
The context is "you don't need an entire terminal multiplexer such as Tmux when all you need is pseudo-tty".
Bringing another terminal multiplexer isn't an alternative. In my agent, I use pseudo-tty without any tmuxes/screens.
No, it wasn't, and I think you've missed the joke.
These are all great. If you need to do something more involved, pexpect is also worth mentioning. It's a reimplementation of expect in python that's easy to be productive with quickly.
I used it in a previous job to automate configuring thousands of network devices
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
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 :)
Right back at you. I think its a pretty interesting application.
> 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.
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.
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.
And, actually having terminals crush. It is kind of absurd to have a terminal crush.
I've tried
Wezterm Ghoatty Ptyxis
First two had some frequent crushes, ptyxis is quiet reliable, but I felt it consumes too much memory for a terminal. But I feel it's a good terminal.
Though I wish I could get rid of the headerbar
What is “terminal crush”? I’ve not heard of this before.
I'm assuming "crash"--it's a mild malapropism based on some varieties of English phonetics that I've seen before.
Oh, my bad he he, as other corrected
I think he's referring to being married to or "crush" on the terminal you use
you mean "crash"? But who I am to judge if you have a crush on a terminal, some of them are really beautiful in their minimalism. :-D
Ah, terminals ARE really nice, aren't they? Fast and efficient. Can't say that for too many apps.
Nevertheless, yeah, I meant crashing, All these years of gnome terminal, Tilix I never had them crashing.
Have you tried Ghostty? Its creator has been pretty serious about getting everything right.
I asked what test suite they used to ensure they had the correct behaviour, and they were fairly dismissive, so I'm not sure what you're basing that on. I think they're far more interested in a specific set of features than getting things right.
I tried it a few months ago and it didn’t even have a way to search terminal output.
That's the most annoying part of ghostty at the moment. I have no idea why it isn't a priority :( https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
Because Mitchell doesn't use terminal search, and neither do most of the maintainers.
How is this even possible? Just pipe result from a command into a file and open in vim and search it that way? Perhaps use Neovim's built in terminal where you can search at will? I find it hard to believe that "I don't ever search" is a thing.
That's what pagers are for (e.g. less.)
He probably uses tmux which has features for all of those things, why should the terminal re-implement them?
He gave an interview on YouTube, which contradicts this.
https://youtu.be/o-qtso47ECk?si=6gWzcL9-69Njd8jq
Well, I am perplexed then.
It does kinda sound like he's trying to reinvent X11.
I don't think I've ever intentionally used the scroll back search in iterm2 and deliberately disabled the shortcut for it because I kept triggering it by accident. I don't understand wanting or needing it, at all.
ironically, the last time i tried it in my normal workflow, it refused to interpret certain escape sequences... to the terraform cli application. i couldn't finish a `terraform apply` - i'd type `y` and hit enter but it would just print `^M`.
Oh yes, using a new terminal emulator instead of one which has been around for decades. What could go wrong? It's creator has been vocal that it's nothing more than a side project
I agree. It's also true of nearly any program. If you do not set its configuration properly, it may not work as expected.
In the case of TMUX, it can be a bit annoying because it's not immediately apparent _why_ things look wonky. But I'm not sure what the solution is. Default to 256 colors?
Indeed, the TERM environment variable actually is the configuration of "nearly any program" (excluding the ones that aren't doing explicitly terminal I/O, of course, and the bad ones that just ignore TERM and make assumptions). Set TERM wrongly, and one has set the configuration incorrectly for a whole load of programs, in one fell swoop.
> Setting TERM properly isn't some tmux-specific problem.
Correct, but it's another layer to deal with. There are `tmux` specific TERMs that should be used which sit on top of your terminal emulator TERM. This was my point: you have another layer that you need to be aware of when using tmux and when debugging.
Just look at the top of tmux's FAQ:
https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/FAQ
> PLEASE NOTE: most display problems are due to incorrect TERM! Before reporting problems make SURE that TERM settings are correct inside and outside tmux.
> Inside tmux TERM must be "screen", "tmux" or similar (such as "tmux-256color"). Don't bother reporting problems where it isn't!
> Outside, it should match your terminal: particularly, use "rxvt" for rxvt and derivatives.
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 . 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.
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.'
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-...
> 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.
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-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. (-:
My VT420 doesn't support hardware flow control, but software flow control does not play nice with many modern terminal applications. GNU Screen provides an extremely effective workaround, plus its other features. I've used tmux a lot on modern terminal emulators, but it seems to lack this important feature for vintage terminals. Glad that tmux solves your problems with broken apps that don't support termcap or terminfo.
Fellow VT420 user here! The problem with tmux is that it disables flow control, but you can fix that with this:
Then you'll want to run this before starting tmux: I also recommend using a dedicated tmux socket with the VT to avoid accidentally connecting to an unpatched tmux server that helpfully re-disables flow control. That happened to me while I was testing the patch, and it was infuriating.I've also hacked up support for storing tmux window contents in different pages of VT memory, so you can switch windows instantly without waiting for full screen redraws. It's a bit rough around the edges (doesn't handle split windows very well, for example), but it's enough of a quality-of-life improvement that I use it anyway. It's a bit long for a comment, but I can post it somewhere if you're interested.
Feel free to email me if you want more information about my setup.
> I think alacritty is better
Can I ask why? It starts slower (has a significant lag on old hardware), has way less useful features (like tabs), has the same responsiveness, and loses in benchmarks (for what they're worth). I see no reason to use it when kitty/ghostty/konsole/foot exist (depending on one's preferences), but people obviously do.
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.
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.
My tmux config has clickable tabs in one terminal.
I 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.
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”
> 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.
> “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!
Just 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.
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.)
On 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.
Macs 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.
you 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.
You can also hide an entire application rather than minimizing specific windows. It'll unhide when you switch back with cmd-tab.
Minimization on Mac is essentially a legacy feature. There’s rarely any reason to use it.
WindowMaker under GNU/Linux and BSD was like that too...
But, OFC, both WindowMaker and Mac OSX come from the same NeXT grandaddy...
well, windowmaker only copied the style, so it's more like a reverse adoption, not a descendant.
Not just that, even if Wing Is Not GNUstep. It was built to host tons of GNUStep applications and their behaviour.
Windows 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.
Whatever fits your mental model I suppose, but every window is accessible via keyboard shortcuts on the Mac too, it just needs a different approach.
Do 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.
I'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/ [2] https://www.raycast.com/
Yeah unfortunately my work doesn't allow 3rd party apps like that (a reasonable restriction, IMO).
Alt-tab? You mean pressing win+w under CWM to fuzzy-find windows per title name, and then spawn it?
But 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!
byobu+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?
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/ )
I'd say suckless and Kitty are pretty much the polar opposites of development.
> 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.
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 replaceabletmux capture-pane - | vim - is a bit more comfortable than the mouse scroll wheel.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.)
> 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.
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!
Nit: didn’t Ctrl-X/C/V come from the original Macintosh? I thought Windows initially followed IBM’s CUA, where cut / copy / paste are instead Shift-Delete / Ctrl-Insert / Shift-Insert (and those still work too).
The original Macintosh had Command-X/C/V, and Windows 3.0 adopted that in addition to the existing CUA shortcuts, but changed Command to Control, as Alt was already in use for menus and form control shortcuts on Windows. So it’s true that Ctrl+C for Copy only became a thing with Windows.
ah, that's a history detail i didn't know about. very well, it's apple's fault then :-)
Apple did it correctly!
Apple provided a new modifier key (Command, or ⌘) for our GUI shell. Or Open Apple/Closed Apple if you go back to the Apple II days. Control still works like it should.
Microsoft said "Hey that's useful, but we don't make hardware, and we don't have a Command key, so let's break things and reuse Control in our copycat GUI, and ignore all of the historical uses of control characters. What could go wrong?"
And then Linux (Gnome??) said "Hey we don't make hardware either, let's do what Microsoft did, because lots of people are familiar with it, and even though the historical uses of control characters are really important on Unix-like operating systems."
> 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.
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
i am looking forward to your post. i added your blog to my rss reader
That's Emacs for you. No, seriously. Have a look to eshell and elisp.
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.
Having native scroll back should be possible if you hack tmux and a terminal emulator.
weztern has a really strong solution in this space when you use it with its multiplexing server on the remote end.
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):
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
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).
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
[edit]
The below is fixed (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:
Would run the old prompt command just nicely instead of the much longer:Better still, use Emacs as your terminal multiplexer:
https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/replacing-tmux-gnu-sc...
Emacs is such a powerful tool, all it’s missing is a workable text editor ;-)
It does have evil mode ;)
Configuring in evil is a nightmare.
Named buffers combined with helm is so good!
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
and later to checkout and see what's gone on with the command long after I disconnected with ssh.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.
I think it's notable that when ubuntu runs an upgrade it starts a tmux session for this reason.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
screen does as well. Unless I'm missing something here.
Do you mean select into the clipboard?
To tmux's clipboard and if required to the system clipboard too...
set -s copy-command 'xsel -i'
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.
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) ;)
i have 5 tmux sessions with a total of 19 windows on my laptop, one of which contains a localhost ssh connection to a second account where i have another tmux session with half a dozen windows. not to mention the tmux sessions i have on my servers.
the key benefit is i only need to learn one set of commands to switch sessions and windows, and to create new windows.
the sessions all run in a single terminal window, so when i have multiple other windows, i don't have to switch between them to find the right terminal window. terminals have tabs, but they don't group tabs into sessions. a single terminal with 19 tabs would not work.
i use the gui to start the terminal. i would have to find out how to script starting a terminal with multiple tabs. tmux is more easily scriptable, and again, i can't avoid learning tmux, since i use it remotely, and so when using it locally too, i don't have to learn a different way for my local machine.
finally, although rarely needed, i can log out, or my gui can crash, but the tmux sessions survive. i can also connect to my laptop from a different device and attach to the tmux sessions that way.
for a gui terminal to replace tmux the foremost feature i need is for it to remember my windows and tabs, just like the browser does. i have not come across any terminal that does that (but i admit, i haven't done a exhaustive search either). gnome (or any WM) can remember which apps i have open, but it can't remember the state inside the apps.
being able to reproduce state is really the key. i have a few vim sessions for example, easily remembered and recalled from my command line history. i could use gvim if i could figure out how to connect a gvim window with a terminal such that they form one unit, because every vim session is connected a number of commandline operations. (i believe BeOS/haiku can potentially do that based on the way its window tabs work)
> localhost ssh connection to a second account
Any particular reason why you cannot simply use su or sudo for this?
it would not make a difference, would it? do you see any benefits? ssh -X can forward windows to my gui and it just works.
Two reasons:
I don't use a tiling WM, and tmux[1] does an excellent job at the tiling features.
I do the majority of my work physically at a Linux (Fedora) desktop, but I also work from home SSH'd to that desktop. Being able to just attach to the same session and pick up where I left off, with all the same shell management, is great.
[1] I used tmux for years, but have very recently switched to Zellij. I find the pane navigation to be much smoother (and more discoverable).
Run WezTerm on the server, too. https://wezterm.org/multiplexing.html
Thank you, already knew about it though.
WezTerm is not necessarily something I want to deploy and keep up to date on hundreds of machines, screen/tmux are still fine for that.
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/resurrect.wezterm
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.
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.
`wezterm ssh` can do this if wezterm is installed on the host.
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.
I'm the same. And I run tmux on server when needed. Best of both worlds.
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.
> 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}"`.
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?
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?
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
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.
Zellij now has a mode that uses a leader key style. So no need to lock/unlock.
But Zellij supports tmux hotkeys.
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…
If you're using kitty and have terminal related problems the easiest solution usually is just not using kitty.
I keep using GNU Screen
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
1. workbench.action.toggleMaximizedPanel
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
does guake support multiple sessions? remembering window layout through restart? or easily configurable startup layout?
Correct statement, but poorly chosen alternatives: zellij is like tmux, but with less scrollback issues and supports mouse.
It is also extensible.
Zellij is great. I have been very happy since I switched over.
You did not hit any of these (many) issues? https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues?page=1
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Zellij handles this, if you click and drag vertically within a pane the selection will stay in that pane even if there's a different pane to either side. Copy happens when you un-click. (Or at least it does this with Wezterm. I wouldn't be surprised if some terminals don't support whatever voodoo zellij is doing to alter the selection behavior).
You can't select arbitrary columns within a pane (like you can in vim) but if I'm understanding you that's not what you're after anyhow.
Vim itself can select a column.
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.
> 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
resp. 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
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.)thank you. getting this to work would be awesome.
Now that I’m looking at this again, I remember that the wl-copy (or xcopy or pbcopy) thing is a workaround for GNOME’s VTE terminal widget refusing to support the OSC 52 escape sequence for setting the clipboard. If your terminal emulator does speak that one, then you should be able to use the set-clipboard option[1] instead, which also has the advantage of working over a remote connection (because it’s in-band).
[1] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard#the-set-clipboar...
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).
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...
well after a quick search it exists: it's called tmux 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
This sounds strictly more complicated than just using tmux.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
i tried using kitty a year ago. i was not impressed: 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.)
It seems that WezTerm can do what you asked
all right, a year ago i tried kitty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40478732 maybe it's time to try wezterm now:
first impression: dark background. no good. i want light. no gui to change. now where is that theme setting? ah, here: https://wezterm.org/config/appearance.html there are 1000 color schemes available! wut? ok, this seems to be all i am looking for: https://wezterm.org/config/lua/wezterm.gui/get_appearance.ht... gee, that's a lot of code for a single setting.
ok, that's better. now let's explore how wezterm handles sessions and windows/tabs.
it seems sessions would be domains, and so for a bunch of local sessions i need to configure some unix domains: https://wezterm.org/multiplexing.html#unix-domains
there is more about sessions here: https://wezterm.org/recipes/workspaces.html but it's all very abstract.
and where does this stuff go? ah, here: https://wezterm.org/config/files.html
turns out that the config example for the color scheme conflicts with setting other config values. i need
that could have been explained better.and finally, how do i switch sessions or tabs? no word about that on the multiplex page. or elsewhere.
fortunately, i found this article which describe an elaborate setup to make wezterm behave somewhat like tmux, with familiar keybindings. maybe i can get this to work: https://mwop.net/blog/2024-07-04-how-i-use-wezterm.html
oh, one last issue: there are no resize handles, or a titlebar, although according to the descriptions they should be there. where did they go?
When I first tried to port my tmux config to wezterm it took about a day to learn about all the wezterm concepts, map them to their tmux equivalents, and reach an mvp. I tend to be on the slower side to pick things up though.
Locally - I far prefer wezterm now. The only issue for me was that getting persistent server side sessions seemed to come at the cost of some weird neovim gui refresh and latency issues which I'm not sure are fully solved yet, so I still use tmux for that. Looking at the issue tracker, maybe I should try again, seems that at least some refresh issues have been addressed since I last checked https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/4607
Hahahaha this was a fun read ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/...
But I agree that tmux sessions are convenient.
I just use Emacs for this.
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.
No, sorry, no.
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.
I’ve migrated from tmux to zellij. And I’m playing around with omarchy and am really digging the tiling window manager feature
> "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...
You lost me at nohup.
I am regularly using waypipe to use a remote kitty terminal.
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?
Have you tried setting 'termguicolors' in vimrc?
https://vim-jp.org/vimdoc-en/options.html#'termguicolors'
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)
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?
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.
very interesting. im going to continue using tmux instead of doing any of that.
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.
If your main issue is session persistance you should try using mosh
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.
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'.
If I could just figure out how to scrollback in ghostty I probably wouldn’t bother with tmux.
Are you serious?
Press "<Enter>~." into your ssh window.
Do you think ssh isn't interpreting escape codes either for some reason?
i smell copium
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.
I too also don't understand other people's workflows but believe I know the best way to interact with a computer.
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!
not appreciating the snark. tmux does way more than being an alternative way to get tabs.
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.
No snark
thank you. that helps.
All done in GUIs and done better
could be done, and i agree. but i have yet to find a terminal GUI that actually does.
tmux has a great and useful TUI. all the terminals i have tried so far, have a very minimal GUI. they have tabs, and some have panes that's about it. tmux works out of the box without any configuration at all. i can just build up my sessions interactively. i evaluated kitty a year ago, and i am testing wezterm now. neither are usable without having to manually write an elaborate config file, and neither include all the features that tmux has.
i would love to find a GUI terminal to replace tmux. but there isn't one yet. at least it looks like both wezterm and kitty are working on it. so maybe in a year or two there will be something that can actually compete with tmux. but until then it's just a wish.
Get rid of terminal all together. That's the angle I'm coming from. Problem solved.
well that's even worse, i mean in terms of what GUIs so far have achieved. a GUI that is capable of replacing the commandline has not been built yet.
> Sessions, tabs, windows, tiling . All done in GUIs and done better.
Sorry but no, really no.
Windows:
- Has two ways of swapping between windows, taking up 2/3 of my modifier keys for use with Tab
- Loves to offset windows by one pixel and resize my taskbar
- Irrevocably moves things around if I disconnect a monitor
- Flashes taskbar icons constantly, like a particularly badly behaved terminal bell
and Mac:
- Leaves zombie processes in the cmd-tab list
- Is philosophically incompatible with any kind of fullscreen workflow.
Both have:
- Slow animations for basic windowing
- Only a few tiling options
- Minimal configurability...
- ...which doesn't matter anyway, because if someone at HQ gets bored, you're getting a UI interface redesign that's incompatible with your current workflow
- An approach to tab dragging that induces seizuring windows, because things are just too slow and fickle
- The ability for anything to steal my focus, mid-typing
But what's most damning of all is that both have a wealth of popular tools written and used by people trying to wrangle them into something useable.
There is nothing I could do to make them as fast to use as my tmux based workflow, simply because they do not work quickly enough for the keypresses I'm entering and don't even appear to be deterministic.
Use different apps. Don't have to stick with the default OS window primitives. omfg. I use loop for macos.
So for some reason a terminal app where you can't even draw a proper line vertically across the screen... somehow the people who make apps for terminal are geniuses in making windowing UIs, more genius then people who want to work in pixels. I don't understand why.
And these complete geniuses are like, NO! I don't want to work with pixels. I want to use ascii characters to draw stuff that ONLY looks sort of like boxes, because that's the smarter thing to do!
And don't get me started on config files. What's better, a menu where I'm presented with all my options? Or a freaking config file where none of the options are presented and I have to look it up in a man page and then if I make a typo often it doesn't tell me there's a problem.
And likely you aren't even using that terminal app in a proper terminal. You're emulating a terminal underneath a GUI which is a huge performance penalty. Modern OS's present to you an advanced interface, but you're too elite to use it, so you EMULATE a primitive interface underneath the advanced interface.
Bro use linux and uninstall gnome or KDE. Throw that mouse into the trash. That's the common sense future of UI according to you?
a freaking config file where none of the options are presented and I have to look it up in a man page
oh the irony. because that is what wezterm and kitty make me go through. i'll have a report soon.
EDIT: here is the report: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762241
that wezterm config file is a monster. all that, just to have tmux like functionality. well, at least it is possible. that's a massive step forward.
>What's better, a menu where I'm presented with all my options?
You get neither