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Comment by modo_ | Hacker News Reader

Is there much of an upside to doing the multiplexing on the client side instead of on the server (with something like tmux)?

It seems to me like the session persistence tmux gives would be worthwhile if you have a lot of simultaneous sessions going.

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scp and sftp will multiplex too. Remote tab-completion for file transfers also becomes much more approachable this way.

scp remote:~/err[tab] .[enter]

Also, bastion connections get multiplexed as well so connecting to multiple different hosts behind the bastion goes faster.

So you’re saying SCP will tab complete through the control master socket? Neat.

for me this is a common pattern:

  ssh x

then in other windows, I do things like this:

  scp file x:
  ssh x command
  rsync from/ x:to/
  emacs /ssh:x:filename    (this is tramp mode)

edit: one more thing

  ssh x -o BatchMode=yes command

if you have an automatic script to run on a remote machine, adding BatchMode=yes will make it error out instead of stopping and asking for a password

I never saw the value of tmux unless your running a command that can’t be interrupted.

Having multiple windows vs tabs on my desktop seems so much easier.

Yes, I agree. What is the usage for tmux? Multiple tabs on a quake-style dropdown terminal on a desktop (like guake) does seem much easier than tmux, especially when gnu-screen is always available when you need to run an uninteruptible command.

From what I gather, tmux is useful if you are basically running a persistent remote workspace via terminal on a server and treat your desktop like a thin-client, is that correct?

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