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Comment by ficklepickle | Hacker News Reader

Moment of shame. I don't understand terminal multiplexers. I just open a new terminal and SSH in again if need be. Keyboard shortcuts to arrange the windows.

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Main feature for me is that I can have a few terminal windows/panes open, close the terminal, and open it back up later to the same tabs and panes still running. Or, I can open a terminal on any virtual desktop and get the same terminal on all of them.

I work with a few different hosts on SSH and having an active connection for each as a labelled window (tab) in the terminal itself that I can just open up a terminal anywhere to come back to is great.

Personally I use the `tmuxinator` helper tool[^1] that allows you to create configurations as json files to be launched/attached to with short aliases (eg `mux s myconfig`)

[1] https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator

You’re taking advantage of modern UI tools and modern levels of screen resolution and not intentionally recreating the old way of interacting with multiple terminals simultaneously.

Literally no shame in that. GUIs with multiple windows and tabs were invented for a reason.

That's not the benefit of terminal multiplexers people use them for ...

I know dozens of engineers that maximize one single native OS terminal window and use tmux or screen inside of it to divide it into more “windows” (which are not OS native and just basically ascii frames). Yes there are other benefits too, and I use screen for those uses, but that’s not what OP was talking about.

Whilst I use terminal multiplexers daily on localhost, the best feature of a multiplexer is that even if your TCP connection gets broken, chances are that the long-running, business critical command you had to execute on a remote machine will still be running.

You probably should have bg'ed that process, but yes.

Install tmux or screen, use mosh instead of SSH, and login with a ssh key.

The time waste will be paid off by giving yourself a cross-networks, cross-client, always ready, instant on, saved state, scriptable replica of what you're doing on your computer by arranging windows.

I can mosh to my VPS and have tabs and windows and panels left running as I left them. The connection doesn't fall if I change WiFi hotspots or switch to my mobile hotspot. This works on my laptop, desktop, phone, raspberry, whatever the client.

And doesn't require hardware acceleration /s

Highly suggested.

You still want hardware acceleration in whatever you are running tmux in.

Er, I'm in the same boat as the parent. Also wondering what hardware acceleration does for a terminal emulator? Isn't all this just text?

If you don't, you don't need to do real development there.

Or having a persistent state across long times, or work from a specific tty from another host... Or be able to split the screen to follow multiple outputs...

I mean, you can live without, but once you really meet them, you can no more.

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