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Comment by indigoviolet | Hacker News Reader

Stop using Screen. Switch to Tmux (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/). Screen is voodoo. Tmux isn't.

EDIT: Compare my tmux.conf (http://pastebin.com/m2394d7a2) and my screenrc (http://pastebin.com/d7bb649a5). It was much easier for me to set up tmux the way I wanted from reading the manpage, than it was to configure screen. My screenrc is a hotchpotch of cut-and-paste from lots of different sources, but I never really understood screen. Maybe that's just me.

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Care to clarify "screen is voodoo. tmux isn't."? That's pretty meaningless.

The overall design to tmux is quite a bit cleaner, and (having poked around in their respective sources), I know which I'd be more likely to contribute patches to. It took screen forever to get vertical splits (are they still an unofficial patch?), whereas tmux already has dwm/XMonad-style layouts.

tmux is also included in the standard OpenBSD install. Make what of that you will.

Compare my tmux.conf (http://pastebin.com/m2394d7a2) and my screenrc (http://pastebin.com/d7bb649a5).

Granted, my screenrc is a hotchpotch of cut-and-paste and default stuff from lots of places, but that's actually the point: I could read through the tmux manpage and set up tmux the way I wanted, without cobbling a conf file together from the blog posts and mailing list emails of wiser people.

Not being familiar with tmux at all I tried to simply drop in your config (changing only the default path) but all I get is syntax errors at every turn (unknown option status-justify at line 4).

    tmux 0.8 (20090604-0818)

Which is in the Ubuntu 9.10 repos. I'll take any suggestions, but I'm happy with screen :)

my tmux is cvs. You can just comment out the options that fail, but I recommend getting a newer release. It builds really painlessly.

Yea, noticed the newest is 1.1... I'd prefer to find a debian package for it rather than building it though, I often need to rebuild machines and I always regret adding steps like this (I can just stick with screen since it's everywhere for free). I'll see what I can find... Thanks.

Edit: 1.1 package: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/tmux/tmux_1.1-1_...

Some commands are still not working (pane-active-border-bg and capture-pane, it seems) but I can take a closer look at those after playing with it for a while and getting comfortable.

yeah, I built from cvs specifically for those commands.

http://packages.debian.org/sid/tmux lists the deps and different arch's too.

Tmux solves a problem for me. Previously I was using a combination of Screen and dvtm (http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/) to get the equivalent of multiple screens, each with their own splits. Screen can do splits but you can't maintain splits in one screen/tab and move to another screen with independent splits. It's hard to describe, but if you've used screen or dvtm you probably know what I mean. Tmux seems to have that built in. Awesome, thanks.

Screen has a very large chunk of the potential market share for this sort of utility app. Tmux is going to have to be 10 times better to get people to switch. ("Screen" also has a name that's easy to remember, and to spell.)

Is tmux 10 times better than screen? Cause that's what it's going to take to get people to switch at this point.

Not having used either program, I'm more inclined to try tmux just because it seems to give some visual cues about what's happening. Gnu-screen seems oriented entirely towards remembering commands, something that doesn't appeal to me.

That said, I think both programs more explanation concerning what they do.

Not 10 times, no. On the other hand, tmux is improving quickly; if not every day, at least every week. screen, on the other hand, seems pretty stagnant.

That's because screen does what most people who use it want. I haven't used "new" functionality in newer versions of screen since I first started using it years and years ago.

I wish someone would write an actual article on tmux and post it here, every time screen comes up I just here statements about the vague superiority of tmux.

No promises, but I might get around to it this weekend. I've been meaning to write something for a while. The tmux man page is quite thorough, but there are a few things that might be confusing if you expect it to behave like screen, such as layouts.

It's easy... rather than the Ctrl+A key sequence that you use in screen, use Ctrl+B in tmux. And to reattach, rather than screen -r, tmux attach does the trick. That's 90% of the usability difference.

People usually point to the BSD license and better code-base as the main selling points. Then they point to vertical split (which you can patch screen to do).

Bottom line is, if you have a screen config you like - there's not much point in switching. If you're just getting into terminal multiplexers, it's worth a look.

For emacs users Tmux is far more intuitive, what with the bindings you expect doing what you expect. Binding C-space for begin selection in screen seemed to be impossible.

I've been using tmux, but it feels less inituitive than screen, and I haven't seen as many howto's and such for tmux as I have for screen.

tmux may be better, but it feels harder to get proficient with than screen.

I tried tmux after "not getting" screen. I found tmux to just work without me having to do a lot of R-ingTFM. Speaking of RTFM, tmux is now in the base system of OpenBSD so I would not be surprised to see more how-to's online now (not sure when you tried it).

I haven't seen any HOWTOs for tmux (I've thought about writing one), but as usual, the OpenBSD man page is very good, and thorough: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=tmux

Is screen really that terrible? Enough to switch to something else? Screen is largely standard at this point. Why would I want to switch to this tmux?

Tmux uses some non-standard escape sequences, e.g. ctrl- and ctrl-shift- arrow keys. In version 1.0 it's impossible to distinguish between ctrl-left and ctrl-shift-left.

Turns out there's a window option "xterm-keys" that makes things better.

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