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I simply open multiple ssh sessions if that’s what’s needed. My terminal can then natively do tabs, panes, ligatures, emojis etc. There’s no middleman.

So after all these years I still managed to not need tmux. Am I missing out? Everyone seems to be using it.

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I got in the habit of using GNU screen and so have never used tmux. But if you have a long-running text UI program (e.g. irssi) you want to be able to connect to on a whim and pass around to multiple client sessions, they're handy for that.

Yeah, I've also been using screen for years without ever feeling the need to switch to tmux. Although remote ssh work is relatively rare for me (eg a couple times per month)

That's by far a different work experience. Imagine to start a long running process on remote, probably after hopping through a number of different machines. The long running process should not get killed. This is not possible to guarantee on ssh connections.

Similar, I keep all my work alive in remote sessions in tmux. Vim IDE, mutt, ... I would not want to re start this everyday. The best part is, I can reach my setup from office and from home and mobile. And if necessary even from my phone.

I usually just do: ctrl-z, bg, disown. Sure, I'll lose the output, but typically that's OK for me.

For me personally tmux giver minor improvements (some of them are done by some terminals, some are not), e.g.:

* Text selection using variuos shortcuts (usually I use it only for URL):

https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-copycat

* FZF autocompletion from output, e.g. in case I want to diff some file I see changed in `git status`:

https://github.com/laktak/extrakto

tmux is one of those things that is nice if you take the time to learn and actually USE it for awhile.

But it doesn’t have amazing uses that immediately make you say “wow”. The biggest I’ve found is setting up something on a remote server and being able to disconnect it. For example it can be much nicer for running a Minecraft server than daemonizing.

I felt the same way, but ended up learning tmux because you can't make asciinema span multiple tabs or panes, and sometimes you want to make an asciicast with more than one shell.

It's handy to know sometimes, but if I have a sane window manager at hand then I don't use tmux. They're not common, sane window managers, so I use it occasionally.

If you just want a super simple tiling WM for demos and such, ratpoison is as minimal as it gets.

StumpWM similar concept but more powerful.

> because you can't make asciinema span multiple tabs or panes

Of course you can:

1. create tmux session, create splits/panes 2. detach 3. asciinema rec 4. attach (inside asciinema rec)

This way asciinema records your whole terminal, and tmux running inside of it.

In other words, if you have it like this:

terminal -> tmux -> pane -> asciinema rec

asciinema can't see outside of the pane its running in. However, if you have it like this:

terminal -> asciinema rec -> tmux attach

asciinema sees all of it because its parent is your terminal, not tmux pane.

The best use case of tmux for me is Azure Cloud Console, where there is no good way/cumbersome to open multiple sessions at once.

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