A Quick and Easy Guide to Tmux

Good article. This was 2015 (!)

A few years later, I released The Tao of tmux, available for free online: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read.

Random: this is a lean, cross-platform program I've used in the status line for ages: https://github.com/thewtex/tmux-mem-cpu-load

tmux has been getting steady updates throughout the years: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/blob/master/CHANGES.

It's nice to see a program that does one thing well and gets such quality attention.

For anyone who's already using tmux and wants to persist their sessions across restarts, I cannot recommend tmux-resurrect and tmux-continuum highly enough.

https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum

I dislike the default prefix key for both screen (C-a) and tmux (C-b) because they conflict with useful commands in emacs and the terminal (go to beginning of line, go back one character). I finally found C-j worked well for me (for both) because I very rarely want to use it directly so the occasional C-j C-j doesn't bother me much.

I found only 4 alphabet characters that didn't seem to have a conflict with something I used often enough for it to be annoying: g, i, j, m. Tried each, settled on j because of comfort while typing. Also hitting C-g when I wasn't in tmux turned out to be annoying on some systems.

Any news/updates on tmux vs gnu screen? Last I looked (years ago) I couldn't find a compelling reason to switch from screen - are there any (that you find compelling)?

See also: https://tmuxcheatsheet.com/

I’ve become a huge fan of tmuxinator. Incredible tool for defining templates for tmux.

https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator

Here is my .tmux.conf [1]. This file also contains a basic tutorial. I set the PREFIX key to ctrl-a as it is more ergonomic. I also have a "mouse-mode" that can be toggled. When enabled, you can use the mouse to resize panes.

[1] https://github.com/jftuga/universe/blob/master/tmux.conf

Tmux is incredibly reliable and can even keep sessions between reboots with a plugin, to a certain extent.

save yourself a bunch of hassle learning another set of obscure commands and use the iTerm tmux integration. https://iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html

I like tmux but it’s really annoying that you can’t scroll back up, and you need a special shortcut to go into “copy mode” to do that. Maybe someone has a hack to make this more pleasant?

I spent a few days deep diving on tmux, getting my config right. I’ve been using it for 5-6 years since then without having to learn anything further. Great ROI, highly recommended.

tmux is a fantastic tool, but it tends to intimidate naive users.

My way of reassuring them is telling that they only need to remember one key shortcut, namely Ctrl+B at once followed by "?" to get to the help screen.

I can't say a lot of people around me end up using it, but must of them just don't need it that badly.