Show HN: tmux.nvim – turning Neovim into a terminal multiplexer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: tmux.nvim – turning Neovim into a terminal multiplexer

github.com

53 pointsspywhere20 comments

I currently use tmux and vim all day every day, including as my dev environment (if I'm not in a browser). Are there any advantages to this?

My initial thought is that having vim inside a terminal session is a better organization model than having a terminal session inside of a vim pane, but maybe that's just because it's how I've worked for 20 years so it's what I'm used to.

I know that some vim users prefer to run commands from inside vim. Is that the type of people this project is aimed at?

I sometimes try to edit a file in neovim only to be warned that I have the same file open already (in some other tmux window or pane).

I imagine having tmux in vim instead of vim in tmux might resolve that issue for me. I'm curious to try this for that reason.

> Are there any advantages to this? Is that the type of people this project is aimed at? Short answer: No, quite the opposite as of its current state.

Long answer: Even though I'm also using (neo)vim inside a tmux, there are a few caveats that I need from tmux.

The main one is while tmux is pretty much available everywhere, it's doesn't support Windows. My work machine (as provided by the company) are running on Windows and a lack of terminal multiplexer which prevented me to have the unified development environment across multiple setups from my MacBook to my Raspberry PI Zero.

Also, with one binary, you would hit 2 birds with one stone. Given that you're not doing anything fancy beside basic terminal multiplexing.

One disadvantage of the Tmux approach is that if you have multiple nvim windows open, you can't copy from one to another.

You can, has you have multiple ways of copying things. Yanking to the "+" register in n/vim would put the content into your primary clipboard that you can paste with tmux (or ctrl-v).

You can set wshada|rshada to occur on FocusLost|FocusGained.

https://neovim.io/doc/user/starting.html#shada-read-write

I use a setup like yours, with one nvim pane and many terminal panes. But I prefer to stay in vim land rather than typing directly into the terminal. So I edit my commands in nvim and use vim-slime to send them to the appropriate pane. I don't really have a need for tmux.nvim.

nvim inside of tmux is my go-to development environment (i.e. https://matt-w.net/blog/workspace-management/), so I'll definitely need to check this out.

Doesn't support detachable sessions yet, though. That's a core requirement for me, so it'll need to wait for Neovim 0.7.

I use vmux (https://github.com/jceb/vmux/) to redirect all files opened for editing (via nvim some_file.ext) from any tmux window to a single Neovim session.

Honest question: I don't question the positive impact nvim had on vim's development and improvement. It really fostered new ideas and was key in pushing parallel module runtime.

Is there a point to switching to nvim now though, with vim 8 available everywhere? What does nvim brings?

Lua for writing plugins, tree-sitter-based[1] syntax highlighting.

[1] https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter

While tmux has issues this would likely be the opposite of what I want because now my processes are reliant on vim. There is zellij if you want a fast Rust-based alternative to tmux.

I use dtach to launch console processes with persistence.

I havent switched to neovim yet, but for a lot of my work I have very long running vim sessions that i reconnect to. I find it much nicer having a single system managing my environment than multiple different layers.

Also tmux is a terminal emulator, where-as dtach passes through, and I find a lot less weird color handling & other bugs with dtach.

https://github.com/crigler/dtach

off topic, but what makes zellij faster than tmux? Are there any benchmarks (I am unable to find any on their site or github page) or is it just because it is written in rust that it is assumed to be fast?

I'm not suggesting it is faster than tmux, just that is is a fast alternative compared to some of the other alternatives. I'd recommend trying it out.

I get that this is under development, but at this point is this really more effective or smoother in terms of workflow than just using standalone neovim and tmux?

> is this really more effective or smoother in terms of workflow than just using standalone neovim and tmux? No, but this would help fill in the gap that tmux lack for some use cases. So, it would all depends on what are looking for from it.

With (neo)vim as terminal multiplexer, you would have a totally different ecosystem where you can integrate various plugins to it. Like tmux has TPM, (neo)vim would have vim-plug (or many more plugin managers) to help integrate another plugins and tailor to your setup.

As a user of neovim, tmux, and vim-plug, I'm interested in this. I have quite a few plugins but my neovim setup is still so much faster than things like VS Code.

Can you explain what this does for me that I don’t get now by using [n]vim’s built-in terminal command? I couldn’t tell from your github page.

what will happen if i logged out incidentally from my server?

with tmux i can just relogin and attach

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