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Comment by aloer | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here who can answer this as well in the context of local work on a Mac? I manually use tmux when sshing into servers but usually that’s one session split in two and that’s it.

Locally I use iterm2 with a single hotkey window but multiple tabs with one per project and then up to 8 panes per tab. These stay open for many months until the inevitable restart for system updates. I feel like I have pretty good persistent terminals this way.

But would there be any benefit for me using tmux locally? I know that iterm2 has some kind of integration with it but I‘ve not tried that

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> These (tabs and panes) stay open for many months until the inevitable restart for system updates.

And iTerm won't have a way to restore them, right? The `tmux resurrect` plugin can save and restore all your sessions, even after restarts. At the moment I have 45 tmux sessions running and I'm not worried in the slightest about not being able to pick up exactly where I was for every project.

Also, tmux is a nice way to "bury" your "windows." Hiding an iTerm window can only be done by covering something with it or minimizing it, but a tmux session can be detached from/attached to at will, and when you're detached it doesn't add cruft to your window management.

I don't use tmux but I use screen which AFAIK is the same basic functionality on my Mac. I use it to run long lasting software during development, so the frontend and backend of the service I'm developing for example, since they have hot-reload.

It's not _necessary_ but it's nice knowing I can close my terminals without worrying of having to wait for another 10m build because I like to keep my open windows to a minimum.

I think it's really down to how you use your computer more than a real need.

I use tmux basically the same way but prefer tmux sessions because I find tabs hard to navigate reliably.

With tmux I can assign a name to each session, list all sessions, and have keyboard shortcuts to take me to a specific session or create it if it doesn't already exist. <leader>+J always opens projectfoo, <leader>+K projectbar, etc.

With tabs you need to know which tab contains what and what order everything is in.

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