Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

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raises a hand

My terminal emulator (Konsole) has tabs. It also has tiling features I've never taken the habit to use. It has infinite history and allows me to easily select and copy paste many lines. It has a perfect scrolling behavior: it automatically scrolls, but stops auto scrolling if I scrolled a bit up. I'm used to its keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs. My window manager (KWin) also has tiling-like features when I need to see several terminal sessions at the same time.

I use screen when I need to be able to leave and rejoin later. I almost never need to restore several remote terminal sessions at once, and when I do, I'm happy to just ssh several times.

I feel like my use case is completely covered by the terminal emulator and the WM which are incredibly convenient and efficient. I would expect any layer between this efficient / optimized character display and the programs I run can only add latency. I also quickly feel overwhelmed by a screen full of characters. I think I would miss out on convenience by switching to tmux and it's unclear to me what I would gain.

Happy to be convinced otherwise, though :-)

I use the same setup you use Console etc, but still needs tmux in two different settings. The first one is the same as your usage of screen. The second one is when I teach: I prefer to have my notes and examples on my screen and my presentation on the video projector, but that when I'm live coding or demonstrating something to my students, I have to do it on the big screen which is behind me, and my neck doesn't like that at all ; thanks to tmux I can easily have duplicated terminals on both screens :).

> when I'm live coding or demonstrating something to my students, I have to do it on the big screen which is behind me, and my neck doesn't like that at all ; thanks to tmux I can easily have duplicated terminals on both screens :)

Ah, clever :-)

In the theme of duplicated terminals, once, I used screen so we could share a terminal session remotely on the same server with a colleague to work together.

Oh, sorry for the typo, my phone's keyboard must have "corrected" Konsole to Console. Also, it was supposed to be "but then", not "but that". Sorry.

I got some odd reason why i need tmux: I can't use most "modern" terminal emulators because their input latency is awful and playing RTS games for a decade made me too sensitive to input latency. So i'm using xterm which provides no tabbing but with tmux.

I get this one.

Have you tried Konsole? I've read it's actually one of the fastest, probably not more than xterm though and you'd need to be willing to use KDE software.

I just did, while the input latency is not too bad, i dislike the KDE dependencies and the resource usage.

> I can't use most "modern" terminal emulators because their input latency is awful

checkout kitty. its FAST. I used to use iterm and once I tried kitty for a day, iterm felt infuriatingly slow.

If you have GPU support. I don't and it feels sluggier than konsole.

Edit: Also kitty upstream does not offer a manpage.

Yes, it does offer a manpage.

Urxvt?

Kitty is pretty wonderful. It also has most of the features that tmux provides (and a bunch more)

Have you trier new gen terminal that are GPU accelerated like alacrity or westerm ?

Same here, I use tilix as my new favourite, it has panes & tabs that are just there without having me to remember a complex combo... If I'm remote well I do it the old school way with gnu screen!

I tried a few times to see if I could get any advantage using tmux but always revert back to none at all. To me the scrollback that works 'as expected' without having to remember key combos, and also work with the mouse are a key feature!

Using tmux + tmuxp[1] you can load a pre-configured session and execute arbitrary shell commands for the session, window and pane. I use this to set up shells and editors in the correct dirs (and/or hosts), load lang environments, set env vars and source some zsh aliases and functions that I only want per project. The end result is that I can set up my dev environment (shells with different environments, neovim windows, test runner, various linters I don't wannt integrate into nvim) with a single "tmuxp load <project>".

edit: That is just my personal killer feature, obviously having a terminal setup that is consistent cross platform and great for stream processing is a given.

[1]: https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp

I am with you 100% on this (see my separate comment which mirrors yours almost exactly). I like tmux for one reason: I can disconnect from a remote session and reattach later. If my internet connection is interrupted or or I just need to move to a new location, tmux is awesome for this. Beyond that, I really don't get the appeal of implementing terminal multiplexing at that layer. It's a job that can be done much better by a terminal emulator. ssh even has socket multiplexing built in, if you're inclined to use it, but it's only good for a little bit of a performance boost (quicker connection time by reusing an existing socket).

I use the same - Konsole plus KWin tiling with an extension. I do use Konsole's tiling quite a lot though.

The one big advantage of a multiplexer that I can think of is you can disconnect and reconnect from a session. Not something I really need but might be useful.

Tmux is more keyboard oriented, I guess. For example: I can copy and paste from one pane to another without touching the mouse, which is something I think is not possible with Konsole. (I haven't used Konsole or KDE for many years, so that might've changed).

Tmux is more programmable. You can write scripts to automate stuff, for example setting up a layout, etc. with a degree of freedom that is not possible with Konsole.

You are probably fine with your setup, not trying to convince you ;-)

Personally: I just like fancy TUIs. One of the first things I programmed was mIRC scripts, might be because of that.

Just a suggestion, it's easy to capture command or program output with xsel, just by piping into it, for e.g.: 'ls | grep -i "whatever" | xsel -b'.

It is common for me and I have aliases set up for 'ls=ls -lah', g=grep -i' and 'x=xsel -b', so the actual commandline looks like 'ls | g "whatever" | x'. Then I can paste or redirect the result into something else.

There are probably better command line clipboard managers, but I just happened to settle on xsel, and it seems to work pretty well. That, and using alt and number keys to switch between tabs gets me pretty far with my terminal emulator.

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