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Comment by smadge | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is implicitly assumed, but a terminal multiplexer such as tmux is also a useful utility for using unix as an IDE. For example, you can have a pane for your code in an editor like vim, and a pane for running your tests next to it, and maybe another pane for an interactive shell of your language. Lacking a consistent local development environment, tmux is indispensable when I ssh into into my remote development environment.

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The killer feature of tmux and screen is that it doesn’t kill your working processes when you lose your ssh connection or your terminal emulator crashes. If you (or your boss) is into peer programming, two people can attach a single tmux session instead of crowding around a single screen. The fact that you can crate terminal tiles and sub-windows is icing on the cake to being able to persist work across login sessions

>it doesn’t kill your working processes when you lose your ssh connection

I meet folks all the time who don't know about tmux and this blows their mind. Likewise having multiple panes in a SSH session... and with mouse control!

    set -g mouse on

tmux is bliss!

These days, you can also run terminals as panels in vim, so vim is sort of its own terminal multiplexer now.

  :help terminal.txt

I tend to just write a command in a vim buffer (with all that nice Vim magic), select it and run it with :@"

e.g. I write and yank: r!fancy command arg1 arg2 ..

Then go to the next line and do :@" This will run the command (well execute the colon mode command) and read back the results.

edit: The nice thing about this is that I can do this as a progressing document (command, output, command, output) and scroll back to see what I have done and what the result was.

They should just stick a kernel in vim so I don't even need to install an OS ;)

It's funny, I never really understood why people want to subdivide a terminal emulator. I want to see more lines of code, not read code through a mail slot. My visual layout has always been many tall and skinny terminals and editors. With dual 4K monitors, I've let the windows get wider. I find myself hobbled to be on a single laptop screen, so I usually defer real work until I am back at my desk.

I do use screen for the detach/reattach feature sometimes. But, ever since I started regularly using X Windows instead of a vt220, I use my window manager to multiplex. I will open multiple xterms and emacs X windows ("frames" in emacs terminology). I will never sub-divide one xterm or one emacs frame, and I only learned the command to undo an accidental windowing subdivide, much like I learned to abort from vi/vim if I accidentally get dropped into one due to a missing VISUAL environment variable.

If I can launch emacs through ssh with X forwarding, I will. If not, I'll open multiple xterms and multiple ssh sessions and run many emacs instances in -nw mode. Once in a while, I'll mount the remote files via sshfs and use my local workflow. Even locally, I am just as likely to have multiple emacs instances open as multiple frames from one instance, since I prefer to find files and open them from the shell prompt than screw around with file-opening dialogs in the editor.

Even back in the vt220 days, I was much more likely to use shell job commands to background and foreground for multiplexing rather than want to subdivide the already small console.

Same result but you are tied to your wm key bindings for navigation. With tmux you have everywhere same bingings. Even on machine you see for the first time. Lost connection? tmux a - t0 and all panes are restored. (I also use tiling wm, but not for terminal splitting)

Perhaps that is the difference. I don't float around and use different consoles. I would never enter have my SSH credentials on some machine that isn't my own, so would never get to the point of using an SSH session from a foreign keyboard, screen, and window manager.

My workstation and my laptop computer are my interfaces to the world for 99.9% of my interactions. Without them, I am not working. The only exceptions might be touching a KVM console on a server in our machine room to see diagnostics (otherwise I would use SSH from my office) or a lab computer where I'd only be running local browser or demos.

On a similar note if you like tmux, give i3 window manager a go!

Manjaro i3 (https://manjaro.org/category/community-editions/i3/) is a very nice pre-riced one. Despite a lot of unnecessary bling you wouldn't get with a stock install it gave my crappy old dell laptop a new lease on life.

Manjaro i3 has a few good ideas but had I started using i3wm through that, I'd probably have been turned off it. It's just not my cup of tea.

Fedora Magazine has a pretty decent guide for setting up i3 to a functional state and I can recommend it: https://fedoramagazine.org/getting-started-i3-window-manager...

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