Introduction to tmux (alternative to GNU screen) (opens in new tab)

I recently switched to tmux after years of having used screen, and it's great. It didn't take me that long to configure, which I did mostly by working my way through the man page.

For me, the two killer features that made me switch were the vertical splits (vanilla screen only does horizontal splits), and the distinction between windows and panes.

If it helps anyone else, here's my ~/.tmux.conf file[1], with keybindings that match closely to the screen setup I've grown so accustomed to.

[1] http://github.com/ludwig/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf

So I tried it out and it fixes my 2 pet peeves of screen.

1. The defaults are sane (altscreen is on by default, emacs keys in copy mode by default, no stupid "wuff wuff" covering up my prompt, history is 2000 lines instead screen's almost useless 100).

2. Screen sometimes interacts badly with Terminal.app on my mac. I can't run aptitude from within screen on my mac without it randomly switching to graphic charset mode. Also running emacs inside screen sometime results in the arrow keys not working.

I like it so far. I think I'll switch for a while and see how it goes...

As someone who already has a screen session setup, with bindings and a status bar, and auto-creating screens, is there anything tmux brings to the table?

Great blog post.

Has anybody benefited from using tmux with emacs? Or, when in emacs, is running tmux too overkill?

In case you've gotten used to just using screen on your local machine as I have, as a handy way to manage multiple "ascii desktops":

A useful trick is to ssh to a remote machine and start a screen session on the remote machine. Then you can start long-running jobs on the remote machine, detach, turn your local machine off, come back later, and ssh and re-attach to check on progress.

I assume tmux and similar screen-like programs can all do this.

If the only reason you use screen or tmux is detaching/attaching, there is an ultra-light alternative called 'dtach', http://dtach.sourceforge.net/

"dtach is a tiny program that emulates the detach feature of screen, allowing you to run a program in an environment that is protected from the controlling terminal and attach to it later. dtach does not keep track of the contents of the screen, and thus works best with programs that know how to redraw themselves."

"dtach does not, however, have the other features of screen, such as its support of multiple terminals or its terminal emulation support. This makes dtach extremely tiny compared to screen, making it more easily audited for bugs and security holes, and also allows it to fit in environments where space is limited, such as on rescue disks. "

No conversation about GNU screen alternatives is complete without mention of Dustin Kirkland's Byobu. https://launchpad.net/byobu

It's a user-friendly screen wrapper with intelligent defaults (key shortcuts and tab indicators with the title of the screen session inside them) and a myriad of status indicators for the bottom of your screen

There is also a part 2. Very well written sir!

http://blog.hawkhost.com/2010/07/02/tmux-%E2%80%93-the-termi...

I made the switch to tmux only after very briefly using screen. It helped me in switching away from Textmate to vim, because I could use it like a tiling window manager and have vim going on the right, and man pages/documentation/irssi on the left.

Hey, if anybody here is using tmux or dvtm (or similar) and wants reflowing text, I've been working a program to do that: http://github.com/aplusbi/reflow (you'll probably want the 0.1 branch). It's written in OCaml and requires OCamlbuild.

If you don't know what reflowing text means, run tmux, get some output on the terminal (say from `ls` or something), and then split the window. You'll notice that your output gets cut off. reflow is a terminal wrapper that reformats the text when the terminal is resized.

At the moment it's still really early in its development, but it's working on all the systems I've tested it on. I'm considering adding better scroll-back support, more customization and possibly using the Knuth reflowing algorithm.

screen advantages: ships with Mac OS X, and most Linux distros. Can run against a serial port, so you don't need to install a "terminal emulator" program, all of which tend to suck more than screen.

tmux advantages: much better default setup than screen. Ships by default with OpenBSD. Ctrl-B key doesn't conflict with as many default keystrokes as screen's Ctrl-A.

Last time I played with tmux (v 1.1-1) I found the following behavior a bit of a show stopper:

* start tmux from ~/project1: windows created all start in path ~/project1

* start tmux from ~/project2: first window has path ~/project2 but subsequent windows have path ~/project1

haven't had time though to check if this is a (known) bug

looks quite similar to dtvm which I have been using lately. only complaint over both dtvm and this from my side would be no tabs like in dvm. I like the philosophy of both dtvm and dvm, a simple self documenting header file for config and documentation.

I was frustrated with a project I was working on a couple weeks back and wanted to just hack on something totally different. As a result, I wrote code to display the clock in tmux as a binary clock[1]. As someone who does not do a lot of C coding, I found the code base to be very clean and easy to figure out.

[1]: http://bitbucket.org/mdg/tmux/