Tmux vs screen

wikivs.com

5 points·donaq··7 comments

That is quite possibly the worst "VS" wiki I have ever seen. Where are the comparisons? Why should I want to use TMux over screen? What are the pros and cons?

What I learned from the article:

1. They use different licenses

2. TMux has a client/server architecture

3. One uses ctrl-a and the other uses ctrl-b as the control key

4. The goals for TMux performance is to be "relatively fast"

I've seen a few comparisons between tmux and screen around here and they've all been useless. Can someone around here who is familiar with both PLEASE do a write up?

Tmux is a client/server system and GNU Screen isn't? Really?

How does GNU Screen work then?

From what I understood, when you launch screen, it starts a master, to which you can connect to later on. Each time you start a new screen (ie, you don't connect to an existing one) a new master is started.

Not so in tmux: it starts only one master, and every client connects to that.

I'm not 100% sure I got it right, but from the wiki, that's what I understood. Which makes screen infinitely more useful for my use-case.

Mind you, I never tried tmux.

To my mind, that makes screen client/server as well, only with more servers.

Yes. The wording on the WiKi isn't the most fortunate.

All of this is explained right at the top of the tmux FAQ:

http://tmux.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/tmux/FAQ

There can be multiple tmux servers which run completely independent sets of commands/shells/... but you can also connect multiple clients to a single tmux server and show different running commands on each connected client.

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