Hacker News Reader

Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

Aren't tmux and screen rather equivalent these days? How is an alternative to one, not an alternative to the other?

Shpool doesn't appear to allow for session sharing/remote pairing though?

shpool doesn't allow splitting screens either! But I guess in my head, screen is largely for resuming a shell connection on a remote host while tmux is a window splitter.

Both of them are both of those things.

I always get scared when I accidentally have two shell sessions visible at once in tmux. I immediately exit one. I suppose I should read a bit on it. When I want side to side comparisons I go to the shell running emacs and do it there (post vague because I never remember the different words for windows and panes and shells etc these different apps use.)

tmux has a server containing sessions containing windows containing panes. Screen has sessions, windows, and panes (which it calls regions).

I recently finally switched from screen to tmux and I found that it's pretty seamless (especially because I use vi keybinds in tmux still). Some machines at work don't have screen anymore.

Ok,makes sense. Using this terminology, I asked claude and found out how to move a shell from a standalone window to sharing 2 panes with another shell.

Incidentally, this "screen absent" is why you should always volunteer to help create base shells (programmatically via packer not by hand) - emacs and tmux are always there when I made the image.

What's a base shell?

I don't make the image.

Screen and tmux are almost the same these days. Screen used to not allow side-by-side splits, but it can do that too now.

It has allowed that for a long, long time.

Okay, but is it actually good?

Screen vertical split works fine.

Let me rephrase that -- is it good enough to use 100% of the time you're in a terminal? Cause that's what I do with tmux and it works phenomenally. Haven't had a similarly good experience with screen before, but I'm open to being wrong.

Never had any problem with screen. Have lost a couple of sessions in tmux

With screen splitting?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com