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Comment by Touche | Hacker News Reader

To me tmux, like a lot of tools, suffers from bad defaults that makes it less enjoyable to use. One example is not being able to scroll with a mouse. I usually find someone's tmux.conf online and use it, but always run into strange problems that I don't have the energy figuring out. My current conf suffers from the navigation bar going completely black when I try to rename a pane (can't see what i'm typing).

Really wish more tools took care into making solid defaults and not assuming all users are like the ones on their mailing lists.

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Won't be able to answer all your questions but to enable your mouse scroll add the following to your .tmux.conf

    set -g mouse on

Likewise, to select from mouse you probably need to press "Shift" in Linux or "Fn" in Mac.

I've had more issues with Mac than in Linux with tmux tbh.

I didn't ask a question, I know how to fix the issues.

Is your reply really necessary? It doesn't contribute anything. At least other people having the same issues which you know the solutions but don't share, can benefit. Sorry, it just came out wrong to me.

It contributes to preventing the topic from derailing into "how to configure tmux", which is not what my comment was about. Derailing threads is considered bad etiquette online, it's not just me.

Being rude is also considered bad etiquette online and can derail a conversation just as badly, its not just me

I guess bad defaults have been chosen to maintain stability for previous users. IMHO, man pages should contain a .tmux.conf that demonstrate the "best" usage(s) of the tool.

IMHO man is the most important command in unix and "man man" the first step in learning unix.

IMHO man is one of the worst things in Unix. Generally I find that tldr https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr or bro http://bropages.org/ are far more efficient.

Speaking of... https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/blob/master/pages/common/...

Just learn how to RTFM.

That's just how (most) command line tools are. You have to invest some time to configure them. And hopefully you're not the type who will fiddle with the settings too much once you have stuff working. I use GNU stow to install my ZSH, tmux, vim, etc. settings on new computers and it works well for me.

I was able to work out pasting into tmux from the system buffer, but no solutions I've seen for copying out of tmux have ever worked for me. So yes, that's a pretty basic usability issue.

Hold option, select the text you want to copy, CMD/CTRL+C.

I have a plugin I use for that [1]. I enter copy mode, either by scrolling with the mouse or hitting Prefix + esc. I have the copy mode key bindings set up in vi mode (as is my shell), so I navigate around, hit V to enter visual mode, select some text and hit y. Now that text is in the system clipboard.

https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank

or at least provide a skeleton config with commented out and thoroughly explained options like this one http://download.redis.io/redis-stable/redis.conf

There's no reason to insult the project just because the default settings don't behave exactly how you want them to.

I personally like the default mouse setting, but you're completely free to change it if you don't. People have different preferences, that's why there are configuration settings to change things.

I don't think I'm insulting the project by saying I disagree with their defaults. Certainly no disrespect intended.

> I personally like the default mouse setting, but you're completely free to change it if you don't. People have different preferences, that's why there are configuration settings to change things.

Right, but defaults are important. You have to ask yourself why people are using the project. Are people using tmux for its mouse settings? I think people primarily using it for session management. If that's the case, why does it, by default, override my terminal's settings? That just seems like a violation of "do one thing" to me.

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