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Comment by alchemist1e9 | Hacker News Reader

As a heavy GNU Screen user for the last 2 decades it’s always in the back of my mind if I should be switching to tmux. Maybe there is a compatibility mode.

For those who switched from screen what was the biggest benefit?

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I used screen for about a decade before switching to tmux. The biggest immediate benefit was that terminal configuration across systems was much less brittle. My backspace key backspaced, color consistently worked, etc. Over the past 10+ years of tmux use I've become increasingly more sophisticated in my usage (in particular 1) nested tmux sessions, 2) heavy use of the kakoune text editor's tmux integration), yet my .tmux.conf file has all of 15 lines of content. One other thing: tmux has yet to crash on me, but screen certainly did so numerous times.

For me it was that tmux worked out of the box the way I spent many hours getting screen to work the way I wanted. And then from there, just in general the docs were better, it was updated more often, and in general was a bit less obscure in how it was configured.

Here is my .tmux.conf file. It has a small tutorial at the top of the file and also maps the PREFIX key to ctrl-a so that it feels like screen key bindings.

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

What I like about this config is the "mouse mode". When you split a windows into multiple panes, you can press ctrl-m to go into mouse mode. Within mouse mode, you can use the mouse to resize panes. Outside of mouse mode, copy/paste works better.

This was me. At first it was just like “Hey, prefix is C-b instead of a C-a, so it messes with less” (i.e readline, emacs), then I started to understand the windowing better and it feels a bit more natural with modern terminal emulators. And yes, I know the prefix can be changed.

Overall, I’m still comfortable switching back and forth, but it seems like tmux is the new hotness, so I’m using that most of the time. It’s a bit easier to style, etc.

I like the ergonomics of tmux, but one thing I like about screen is it works as a terminal for serial devices. It's something I use for connecting to my HP and Cisco switches; also Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone boards. Tmux doesn't do that.

tmux can't do anything related to real serial lines. And if you do launch tmux via serial line, tmux is hard-coded to disable software flow control. Its basically for utf8-capable terminal emulators only.

I wrote a decent amount about that here https://www.victorquinn.com/tmux-tutorial

tl;dr tmux has much easier configuration, it is more actively developed and maintained, and now (this isn't in my post) a richer add-on/plugin ecosystem

i switched a long time ago after one too many weird screen bugs, and i've never looked back. at this point i couldn't say why it's better, but you won't regret switching unless you regularly find yourself using boxes without screen.

For me, it was tmux mouse mode, The window names in the status bar become clickable.

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