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Comment by mhansen | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on why you prefer tmux? Myself, I use byobu, a set of user-friendly wrapper scripts around screen.

I did a short (free) screencast about tmux if you want a more visual run-through: http://peterc.org/blog/2010/216-tmux.html

tmux has been recommended frequently lately, but I have not tried it. This seems to be decent summary of the differences between it and screen:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/549/tmux-vs-gnu-scre...

off hand from just playing with tmux for the past 20 minutes, it looks like tmux better abstracts its commands from how it internally tracks the windows and sessions than does screen.

In particular, when i've played with screen, i found that i was frequently stymied by the broken abstraction of the way screen stored its state vs what I wanted to do.

byobu sadly doesn't work on macbooks, but it looks cool!

to further clarify: when choosing a session (and thus a collection of windows), in screen the process id info etc is exposed at the user level, which perhaps is useful to someone, but not for how use terminal and such. Thus because these things are not as directly exposed via the interaction model that tmux does, doing stuff becomes simpler and semantically clearer

Personally I appreciate the client-server design and the memory savings it lends when connecting multiple terminals to the same tmux session:

http://www.linuxized.com/2010/05/switching-from-gnu-screen-t...

Plus the more liberal BSD license but that's more of an ideological issue.

One of the big things is that it preserves split screen arrangements upon detachment. I SSH into a server and basically use Screen/tmux as my IDE, and losing my split screen setup when I detach is very annoying.

tmux was able to split windows vertically before screen was able to mostly due to politics, AFAIK.

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