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Comment by l33tman | Hacker News Reader

Not related to the speed, but is there any terminal for Linux that works like the Mac OSX terminal, in that you can shut it down and restart and it will bring up all the tabs and their cmd histories and scrollbacks for each tab? They do that by setting different bash history files for each tab etc.

And I prefer GUI terminals for this use-case...

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This is pretty tangential, but I just (1 hour ago) found out that iterm2 on Mac can integrate with tmux [1] if you run tmux with the argument "-CC", in a way that makes your tmux sessions map to the GUI windows / tabs in iterm2, including when using tmux on a remote machine via ssh.

I'm really excited about this, since I always forgot the hotkeys/commands for controlling tmux.

[1] https://iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html

AFAIK, iTerm2 is still the only terminal that support this tmux control mode.

> They do that by setting different bash history files for each tab etc.

I wonder what happens when you close all the tabs, and then open a new one. Are all the tabs history merged back into a "general" history file when you close them, so you will get access to its commands in new ones?

I set HISTFILE=~/.bash_history_$TMUX_PANE (when that variable is set).

A bit kludgy, but works good enough for me.

Yes, but if one process is writing its history to ~/.bash_history_1, and some time later you spawn a new shell whose history file points to ~/.bash_history_2, you won't have the commands from the previous session available, right?

Correct, but most of the time I use the same set of panes, created at startup, so the commands are in the history where I need them. And when they are not I grep in ~/.bash_history_*.

I use Tmux. It's a terminal-agnostic multiplexer. Gives you persistence and automation superpowers.

https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki

> And I prefer GUI terminals for this use-case...

This probably isn't to your liking, then, but perhaps it will be of use to someone else: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect

(You can, of course, use tmux with any GUI terminal emulator you like.)

This. I was just looking for the exactly the same thing. For now I use tmux with tmux-ressurect to persist state between reboots. - It works okeyish, I would say it's a good hack but still a hack. It's sad there isn't really solution for this problem maybe aside for warp. My little UX dream is to have such a solution of saveing workspaces integrated with whole OS and apps inside it. - That would be cool.

You could do that with VMs. Maybe qubes?

I find it more preferable to setup bash (or whatever shell you are using) to append into .BASH_HISTORY file at every command. You don't always remember on which tab/pane/window you type which command and most people would do Ctrl + R or use a fuzzy search tool anyway.

Also many times you open a new tab/pane/window and would like to access the history of another one who is already busy running a job so a common history is usually preferrable.

YMMV of course.

Tabby [1][2] has "Restore terminal tabs on app start" under Settings > Terminal > Startup.

[1] https://tabby.sh/

[2] https://github.com/eugeny/tabby

At the time mac os got that functionality their macbooks had removeable batteries.

One fun fact: you could just remove the battery while your apps where running and when booting up again every window you had open would just reopen with everything you had typed saved to disk in case of the iwork apps.

While I fully believe this could work, seems like it might need to be a temp solution. Ripping out the battery seems like a solution that might have more downsides than advantages.

Warp?

https://www.warp.dev/

Might not be 1:1 what you ask for, but it can do scrollbacks for sure and has very advanced command history features.

I have heard some good things about this, but I refuse to use a closed source terminal.

You even need an account to use it. Pass.

I suppose you could "just" run tmux and have more or less the same results (opened tabs with history, but won't survive a reboot) ?

A lot leaning on “more or less”.

A lot depends on what are the important parts. It could be essentially identical if it supplies all the parts you care about and don't actually care too much what exact form it takes. But if you require the same exact gui controls then sure, totally different and not even an answer to the question.

Yeah, it's not the same experience.

And you have to get into tmux configs which is a hassle by itself. I am not a fan of terminal multiplexers, I tend to forget them and when the server crashes or reboot it won't replay/restart what I was doing in those tabs anyway. I just use them for long running jobs I am testing. I also don't like the whole tmux window/pane manipulation you can do, I'd rather have my primary DM to do that well.

It's funny how tmux is downvoted in those replies though :D.

You don't have to get into tmux configs. It's perfectly usable out of the box.

(Here we go...)

I'm curious what your essential configurations are. I've been using default tmux for years, am I missing out?

I remap the escape key away from C-a as that conflicts with emacs and I increase the scrollback size of sessions.

It's C-b by default, C-a is what screen uses. Maybe you copied someone's config, as that remapping is fairly common (or weird distro default? but seems unlikely). I'm personally fine with the default C-b and have always kept it everywhere.

Personally the only thing I really need is `mode-keys vi`, the rest is optional. I guess you want to configure mouse on/off depending on preference, if it differs from the default.

Usually will at least change the color of workstations and desktops just to make it more visually obvious which tmux environment I'm looking at when sshing and nesting.

> I also don't like the whole tmux window/pane manipulation you can do, I'd rather have my primary DM to do that well.

I agree, and have settled on `dtach`; holding a pty is all it does.

If you want only the other half of it (terminal “window management”), there’s dvtm.

For a short while I tried using dtach + dvtm instead of screen but I wasn’t really gaining anything

How does it work in MacOS? Since some terminal commands are interactive (vim) and others have side effects (well, really, effects— rm won’t have the same result if you replay it!) I guess they can’t just be replaying/restarting programs, right?

You can do the saving part automatically by setting a different history file automatically for each instance of the shell, for example using a timestamp on your rc file and force them to append after every command.

Then if you open a new shell and want history from a particular older shell you can do `history -r <filename>`

So it is an hybrid automatically saved, manually recovered mode.

VSCode/vscodium's IDE terminal does this.

no it doesn't, at least not in my case. Any settings to do?

It does for me when using a remote instance, like a devcontainer or over ssh. Maybe that is just because the server side keeps running and when you reconnect the UI reloads from there. Locally nothing would remain to be reloaded when you restart VSCode.

Presuming my understanding of persistent sessions lines up with yours, set `terminal.integrated.enablePersistentSettings`. You may also want to change the value of `terminal.integrated.persistentSessionScrollback` to something higher than the default (1000? not sure)

Is that not related to Powershell's handling of history?

warp.dev is a good alternative

> good alternative

- Closed source

- Requires an account to use

- Collects your data

No, thanks. There are plenty of superior options out there.

guake

indeed, if you just need a quick terminal for the odd command here and there, guake is amazing

I am on the command line almost all the time and use guale almost exclusively. Basically it and Firefox. I love my setup.

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