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Comment by suslik | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I've tried tmux like a hundred times and could never learn to like it, falling back to screen and promising to myself - never again. I'm going to break my promise to try this.

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I've always found screen's ctrl-a is so much easier to reach for than tmux's ctrl-b. I recommend re-mapping ctrl-b to ctrl-a

I use Ctrl-Space.

    unbind-key C-b
    set -g prefix C-Space
    bind-key C-Space send-prefix

I find it a lot easier to type than either Ctrl-A or Ctrl-B.

The real superpower prefix key is ` especially if you have a british mac keyboard.

Both C-a and C-b are so commonly used that I don’t like either of them. I ended up going with C-\ since I only rarely use that one.

I just remapped the keys to ctrl-z after I swapped ctrl and caps lock. As you'd never suspend stuff under tmux for obvious reasons, you'll get the whole keyset for any cli/tui software.

I'll bite. What's so obvious? I suspend jobs in bash all the time while using tmux.

Often TMUX it's for tasks you woudn't suspend. And, if any, you can just use kill -STOP and kill -CONT among other signals from another tmux pane.

Or if you want to stay in same pane, (chord, I still use C-b), :, "send-keys C-z"

pinky on caps and ring finger on z ?

+1. Was using screen with this and now tmux for the last 15 years maybe.

I use tmux to replace terminal emulator tabs, I also suspend jobs all the time (most notably vim to run git commands)

In any case with your bindings you can still C-z z and it sends C-z to the process.

I never really understood the people who use these keybinds. Do you not use it to go to the start of the line?

Personally no, I use vim keybindings in the terminal not emacs which is the default.

Ctrl-a and then a still goes to the start of the line.

I've had it on C-o forever to mostly stay out of readline's way, but I've been dabbling with C-Space.

Isn't the screen equivalent literally this?

  Host tmux
      HostName 1.2.3.4
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/etc.etc.etc
      RequestTTY force
      RemoteCommand screen -dR

Edit: I guess it's missing the iTerm integration

> falling back to screen

So you're saying you're a masochist

I’ve used screen for 25 years. What am I missing without tmux?

mainly sessions, i think, and maybe scripability. sessions are groups of windows. i have one session per project or work mode. (one for email and connecting to remote machines, one for writing stuff, one for managing my hobbies, one for dev work...)

Screen has sessions. You can name them, and choose which session to resume when you reconnect.

I use tmux now because it’s supposed to be cool but secretly like gp I also wonder what the actual difference is , besides a different default leader key. Oh and killer iterm2 integration.

it's been a long time since i used screen. afaik screen had one session per process. you could switch processes by detaching from one and attaching to another. in tmux it's all one process, which allows you to create new sessions and switch them interactively and move windows from one session to another, or even have a window in more than one session. i can also see all windows from all sessions:

    (0)   - main: 6 windows
    (1)   ├─> 0: elvish-
    (2)   ├─> 1: elvish*: "[mosh] embee@foo:~"
    (3)   ├─> 2: elvish
    (4)   ├─> 3: elvish: "embee@bar:~"
    (5)   ├─> 4: elvish: "[mosh] embee@fedora:/etc"
    (6)   └─> 5: elvish
    (7)   - local: 6 windows (attached)
    (8)   ├─> 0: elvish
    (9)   ├─> 1: elvish-
    (M-a) ├─> 2: [tmux]*
    (M-b) ├─> 3: elvish
    (M-c) ├─> 4: elvish
    (M-d) └─> 5: elvish
    (M-e) - dev: 7 windows (attached)
    (M-f) ├─> 0: elvish*
    (M-g) ├─> 1: elvish-
    (M-h) ├─> 2: elvish
    (M-i) ├─> 3: elvish
    (M-j) ├─> 4: elvish

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