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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Looked at it; didn't see any compelling reasons to switch; went back to screen.

Screen is for the most part "good enough" that any replacement that aims to supplant it completely needs to either be vastly and obviously superior or enough of a drop in replacement that it doesn't require any effort to switch (I'm most definitively not investing time updating config files or changing key presses unless the improvements are dramatic).

As far as I can see, while tmux might be "better" in some nebulous way, the value proposition is way to weak to invest time in switching for me.

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shrug Maybe. It's all about what's valuable to you.

I switched to tmux because it is better maintained and it has better screen splitting functionality. I also mapped screens commands over to tmux, so the switch was basically painless. Took all of 15 minutes.

If you're cool with screen, you're cool with screen. No worries.

The maintenance thing means nothing to me, since I basically don't need any changes unless a new version of my Linux distro flavor of the day breaks it. There's been nothing new in Screen in the last 10+ years I've cared about.

And I don't use the screen splitting at all - I use splitting a lot in emacs, but never in the terminal, so that's basically a non-feature for me.

I want to create, remove and switch between windows, and have a status bar showing their names. That is all.

I guess these are the reasons I've never seen the point in switching.

I thought this too. I invested some time because tmux is shipped by default in OpenBSD and thus I don't have to install screen on my firewalls. I even submitted a patch to tmux to remove all the bindings that I didn't care about so in that early transitional period when was using the help screen often, only the commands I actually use come up.

I REALLY like that the hardstatus line equivalent shows the command that's currently executing (think: bash, make, ./configure etc). That said, if you don't use the hardstatus line, I don't think there's much of a reason to switch unless you want multiple different size panes which screen doesn't really support.

tmux is 4 letters, screen is 6 =) And splitting view sucks less.

I rarely split views, so that makes no difference to me - all my splitting tends to occur in Emacs.

And I never type anything to connect to my screen sessions. How primitive ;)

I have shortcuts for the main machines I use that opens a terminal window, ssh's to it using my key, and attaches to my running screen or starts a fresh one if none is running (rarely - most of my screen sessions are 1+ years old)

My sessions on less important machines run in screen windows.

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