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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

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) ?

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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.

> 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 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?

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 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.

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