Make tmux pretty and usable (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)

hamvocke.com

457 pointsspeckx279 comments

I gave up on it once I discovered https://zellij.dev/

Just even for how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse for copy pasting.

I used tmux for a few years, until one day I discovered Zellij. With its significantly better UI and overall user experience, I was instantly convinced.

This comment would be a lot more convincing if it weren't in response to one expressing the same sentiment :-)

It is actually true though, I only use tmux nowadays when I am SSHed into a server that I need to do some work on.

The only issues I've had with it is that sometimes it's hot keys conflict with vim, but you can easily turn it temporarily off with ctrl+ g.

If you're already used to tmux I'm not sure you would benefit much from changing, but it definitely has a better out of the box with pane hints, names, and more user friendly hot keys.

Maybe give terminal windows in vim a try? vim is not a terminal multiplexer, but if all you need is multiple terminals windows:

:term to open a terminal in a new vim window (or :vert term)

Standard window movements apply (by default the window prefix is Ctrl-W), most important are: Ctrl-W,{hjkl} to switch between windows, Ctrl-W,{<>+-} to resize windows, Ctrl-W,{HJKL} to move windows to edges, Ctrl-W,{qc} to (force) close windows

Enter normal mode of a terminal buffer with Ctrl-W,N: now you can perform vim motions and scroll the output

Enter insert mode with i and you can type into the terminal again

In insert mode: Ctrl-W "x to paste register x, Ctrl-W . to send a literal Ctrl-W. If too annoying, you can change the window prefix of vim

This goes for vim, neovim also has a terminal mode but it works differently I think

> user friendly hot keys

I see everyone complaining about this but as a new tmux user as of a few months ago, I had an LLM assist me with configuring it how I wished and it did a bang-up job. Stuff like using “-“ to split horizontal and “|” to split vertical so you don’t even have to remember it…

Can you use zellij over ssh on a remote server?

Yes you can!

without running zellij on the remote machine? how?

I'm unclear what's being asked. Zellij is just a TUI-based terminal multiplexer like tmux and screen, you either run it locally and SSH within it to a remote machine, or SSH to a remote machine and run Zellij from within the remote connection.

I guess they mean 'have zellij hold your session when you log off/close controlling terminal'. (that would require zellij on remote)

i tried both and i honestly... i didn't see anything different.

i want tmux for three things:

1. easy splits

2. easy scrollback

3. being able to restart a session if my terminal dies

given all that, tmux works exactly as expected.

what are all these "significantly better ui and overall ux"?

There's a number of people who effectively use tmux as their window manager - one terminal window doing literally everything. Locally as well as remotely, but it's more... understandable for remote, where other options are often worse or nonexistent.

For them, there's as much variety of desires as for any other window manager, and there are tons of those. But terminal ones are usually significantly easier to configure in wild ways due to having fewer (but more powerful) knobs to tweak, so a fair number choose just one and configure the heck out of it.

My terminal (terminator) does (2) and the "easy" scrollback on tmux messes up the ability to scroll with the mouse, at least with default settings. I just tried it in zellij and that doesn't. Since I'm only using a multiplexor for (3) and zellij does that too, I'm already inclined to switch.

I know I'd get used to them, but the key combos used by tmux seem very odd choices, even to someone who used to code on a real glass tty!

100%. Tmux didn’t click for me but Zellij did within 5 minutes. Lifelong Vim user so it felt a lot more familiar.

Cool, I'm one of the lucky ten thousand today. Thanks.

Context: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Then, if you're like me and read this years ago, play around with the Light Mode dropdown which was new to me. :)

> play around with the Light Mode dropdown which was new to me. :)

It's this year's April Fools' joke: https://xkcd.com/3227/ :P

Same here. I bounced off it a few times because KDE konsole already had built in tab/pane support but once I picked up neovim the key chords for triggering actions just made so much sense compared to the static key binds of Console that I just started using Zellij for tabs and panes within Console.

I prefer smux.dev

If anyone is looking for a slightly higher level management of persistent sessions, we just launched https://haventerminal.com for Mac

I have been using zmx for the last 2 weeks. It's still a bit buggy (screen repainting) but quite pleasant to use with ghostty.

https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx

Thanks for the report, I heard about it recently and was wondering how buggy it was since it's very new. I'll probably still try it soon.

Thanks! Interesting to read the rationale behind it [0] which in short is, try not to use what is basically a terminal emulator within a terminal emulator, and window management should be done by the terminal emulator. I primarily use tmux for session persistence (in ssh sessions) anyhow, and still default to my muscle memory for new tabs/windows in the window manager. I haven't tried it yet. The proof of the pudding will be in eating it I suppose.

[0]: https://bower.sh/you-might-not-need-tmux

I have a few embedded devices where flash space is limited. tmux is so much smaller than zellij, and it's not even close.

Zellij is close to 50 megabytes, but tmux and all dependent libraries (minus libc, it's always there) is about 2 megabytes.

> Zellij is close to 50 megabytes,

That's a Rust thing. It's what happens when you statically link because you monomorphise everything.

One of the reasons I went Zig for now

And the Rust practice of everything needing at least 300 libraries. It's slowly getting to JS levels of insanity.

Screen is only 280Kb (armv7), statically compiled with curses. That's about 6-9 times smaller compared to tmux.

Yes, but I already require libevent and friends. The overhead, compared to "screen" was worth it, and I get split windows.

and this is a great example why rust will never be relevant in embedded development that actually matters

So I looked into this at one point. Apparently there are ways to reduce binary size.

When I first started learning Rust, my "hello wold" binary was HUGE.

This sentiment seems to be shared widely. Is there a good conversion guide for tmux users?

I tried zellij a couple of years ago when it first got popular and it didn't click for me.

Tried it when it came out on mac and it was super glitchy so I gave up. Also usally tmux is useful when I ssh

https://zellij.dev/screencasts/

has some starting links, if screencasts do it for you

For me the only glitch was some key binding collision with ghostty/aerospace but it works perfectly out of the box on alacritty for me

Thanks. I've tried it and I'm a convert.

I think part of my resistance initially was that it took up much screen space with borders and such. I learned now that that can be switched off or modified. Didn't go deep yet, just tried the different options from `zellij -l welcome`. I think that should actually be the default startup and then maybe disable or prompt to disable in future.

I love the name (from zellige): (architecture) A form of terracotta tilework covered with enamel in the form of chips set into plaster, characteristic of Moroccan architecture.

Cool, I didn't know that. It always makes me think of Zellig, the Woody Allen movie.

Makes me think of Intellij

I tried tmux so many times, could not commit the sequences to memory, but then zellij was just out of the gate, easy to "discover," and then I started writing plugins (rust wasm), and I even submitted a PR which got accepted to support background colors in panes/tabs.

I am a monthly donor, I think it has the right balance of community plus the lead dev has a vision, opinionated but open to inputs, and focused.

> could not commit the sequences to memory

First thing I did was customize all the input commands and configuration with LLM assistance. Smooth as butter.

I did the same, however, I recently switched back because zellij has just gotten too annoyingly bloated. I ended up on tmuxp to build my tmux session and autossh to keep me connected to my various ssh sessions and am much happier.

Once I discovered window managers and graphics, I stopped using half-baked features to emulate them in the terminal.

I use tmux to reattach to programs after the network connection dies, and not really anything else. I would welcome a version of it that stripped out everything but that, and just replayed the last few pages of scrollback on reattach.

> I would welcome a version of it that stripped out everything but that, and just replayed the last few pages of scrollback on reattach.

Like `dtach`?

Thanks. Dtach is definitely closer to what I want than tmux, I'll be trying it out this week.

Check out shpool, whose tagline is "Think tmux, then aim... lower" :-)

https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool

window manager like what though?

Mac WM is horrible, I use aerospace to make it tolerable

i3, dwm, hyprland etc...

I use tmux for everything because I work in a headless VM where a WM isn't available.

You don't have a window manager hosting the terminal window on your host OS? That's the argument being made here, you're already in some kind of tiling or windowed environment, why replicate all of that on the remote?

Because with tmux you can reattach to session from another pc or from a phone and still have the same windows and panes?

because my remote is a server that keeps running while my laptop gets rebooted frequently. i can leave a tmux session running on the server for months...

I ssh in multiple times. If I really needed to, I suppose I could use vnc.

Unless I'm misreading this, I would also offer `mosh` as a recommendation. Has been nothing but excellent for my use cases.

zmosh is zmx+mosh

https://github.com/mmonad/zmosh

I'm in the same boat and https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx has been working very well for me.

I use iTerm2 with tmux CC mode. Works great and gives native tabs and panes.

Using mosh would help specifically with the network reconnection piece.

The only (deal breaker for me ) weakness of zellij - doesn't support copy/paste from the keyboard (from the screen/scrollback) and doesn't support multiple copy/paste buffers.

I do that roughly every 60-90 seconds with tmux - so, until the zellij developers relent (they suggest the "proper way" of copy paste is to pipe the data into a text editor and use that - but has the downside of not supporting system copy-paste buffers.) - no options other than to stick with tmux (or fork zellij - but that seems a bit much....)

Zellij has some controls for how copy/paste is handled. Perhops these could help you in the future? Link: https://zellij.dev/documentation/options.html#copy_command

It does - and we spent an hour or so reading through the code and affordances to see if there might be a possible path.

The general response is that this user behavior, selecting/copying/saving-in-named-buffer is a very "tmux" like usage pattern the Zellij authors don't want to encourage in Zellij. Instead -they suggesting bringing your preferred Text Editor (emacs, vim, etc...) and doing the select / copy /paste in that.

The problems for me are - (A) I know how to select/copy/paste very well in tmux. Don't have the faintest clue how it's done in a text editor, (B) No (easy) ability to have multiple named buffers if you use a text editor, etc...

I summarized them here: https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/947#issuecomment...

This is also the dealbreaker for me, I use copy / paste from the scrollback buffer all the time. And also quick search through the scrollback buffer. I don't want to first pipe all the output to an editor or pager or something; that messes with the terminal colors, indentation, and it's an extra step, making the whole process slower and more tedious.

But I guess Zellij people don't use the keyboard so much for copy pasting. A lot of people just use the mouse.

<button type="button" class="download-hover" onclick="location.href='https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/releases/latest/downloa...'"> linux download </button>

Screaming into the void, I guess, but PSA. Don't use buttons for links. In my case, I couldn't right-click and copy the URL, but there are a lot of other reasons not to do this.

It also breaks a lot of a11y tooling. It really helps a lot of people when developers care about semantic html.

I personally suggest web devs to install axe devtools [0] in their dev browser profile. Also, LLMs have gotten to the point that even the small local models can help a lot [1].

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/axe-devtools/

[1]: Gemma 4: https://pastebin.com/Mjm1Vx4C

Whether this should be a button or link from an A11Y perspective is... kind of up in the air.

There's an argument that links are "portals" that take you somewhere, while buttons cause some action to happen, Whether you treat a file as a resource (which your browser just chooses to save on disk instead of rendering on screen), or whether you treat it as an explicit "download" action, is a matter of semantics I guess.

you can style a link to look like a button if you care about the difference.

but traditionally, references to files are links, and it is up to the browser what to do with them (whether to just download them or to download and then display them). that's what all links are. that's the whole point of hypertext. every link causes the browser to make a request to a server and fetch something. buttons are for activating things, not for downloading.

I've often wondered.. Why _do_ people do this? For one thing it's more code than the alternative

I tried zellij and it feels like its ui was designed by someone raised in the world of blade runner 2049

Last time I tried zellij, a bunch of the default keybinds conflicted with default commands, or maybe vim commands, I can't remember. But the "solution" back then was constantly jumping in and out of "locked" mode, where no zellij keybindings except unlock work.

Didn't seem worth it, considering the giant footprint in comparison to tmux.

Just use byobu, zellij does weird things, byobu just uses tmux (or screen) and has a sane mouse TUI

Zellij still can't hide/show the status bar on the fly[1] and doesn't support windows preview in the windows list mode. Just these two (and many more) things are enough to stop me from migrating from tmux.

[1] https://github.com/zellij-org/zellij/issues/694

You can't rebind plugin maps, so the session picker uses my preferred unlock chord to create a session. Dev had no interest in changing that.

Tried it. It’s certainly prettier and has a few unique features but a number of corner cases I depend on in tmux simply don’t work so back I went

Also, can’t really stand the name.

I really don't like tools that are not distributed via official package managers like apt / apk.

I clicked and instantly gave up on Zellij due to the horrible design fails on the first page supposed to introduce the software to the user.

upfront breaking the basic expectation of having a clickable link is enough for me to know that this piece of software is badly designed and is not worth my time.

Big fan of sane defaults like this.

I like tmux, but I no longer spend time customizing it for every server I run it on, only to be tripped up on some new server I haven't set-up yet.

I love Zellij but it doesn't play well with Neovim. If you try to use both tools heavily (Neovim splits + stacked Zellij panes), your Neovim layouts will get trashed. And if I have to choose between Neovim or basically anything else, Neovim will win.

Sadly, these issues are low priority for the main dev. Instead they are focusing on things like serving terminal sessions over the web, which is useless to me if I can't use Neovim in it.

I left tmux for zellij after several unsuccessful attempts to get Shift+Enter working.

Was quite impressed initially and invested weeks in building new muscle memory, but somehow Zellij crashed with panic more than once, leaving all my processes orphaned. Decided to go back to tmux, and found a simple fix for my Shift+Enter issue.

In case anyone is looking for it, the fix is "bind-key -T root S-Enter send-keys C-j" borrowed from https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6072.

Is it possible for a multiplexer process to die, but in such a bad way that its child processes continue to run?

I’ve been relying on the fact that in the worst-case scenario (if a pane hangs and tmux session becomes unresponsive) I can just kill tmux server and not have to hunt down and kill dozens of individual processes afterwards.

A `kill -9` will cause many a process to die and give no chance to cleanup any child processes. Some percentage of users continue to use `kill -9` by default, which may result in a mess of a process tree. Otherwise if the crash is bad enough that cleanup code cannot run (maybe it's being run on OpenBSD and an incompetent programmer didn't check the return value of a malloc and for some reason the kernel now nukes the process) then there may be orphan children. There may also be sporadic failures to cleanup if the crash, maybe, causes the whole process to exit before the cleanup code in some other thread can run. System load average may also influence how things maybe go sideways.

TIL. I didn’t know it’s the responsibility of the parent, thought OS automatically handles child processes.

When a child process finishes (that is not actively being waited on) it is left in a "defunct" or "zombie" state and will stick around in the process table until the parent process waits on them to fetch exit code. When you kill a parent process with active children, these subprocesses will become orphaned and re-parented to the OS pid 1 (or another "sub-reaper" process depending on your setup).

The OS will typically not kill orphaned/re-parented processes for you. It will simply wait/reap them so they are not left as zombies once they complete. If your parent process spawns something like a daemon server that needs an explicit signal to be stopped (e.g. SIGINT/SIGTERM), these processes will continue to run in the background until they are manually killed or they crash.

I see, so I might still need to hunt down non-daemon but hung processes even after I kill tmux server in which I ran them. Might explain a couple of odd occurrences in the past…

Typically upon control+c being mashed in a shell (unless the terminal is in raw mode or such) a SIGINT signal is sent to all members of the foreground process group, and most of the processes in that group (ideally, probably) go away. This usually includes a portion of the shell (which forked itself to spawn the pipeline or whatever, to call setpgid(2), etc) that usually ignores the signal. In this case it may seem like the OS is doing something, but really it's shell job control (assuming your shell has job control, which most now do, and that you haven't turned "monitor" off, which most folks do not). The kernel is mostly there for shuttling signals around and process bookkeeping.

However a different process management model is that each parent must in turn signal its child processes to exit, in which case if the parent dies before that can happen you easily get orphan processes. There are use cases for both the process group model and individual signal models, and pros and cons to each.

That depends on how the children were spawned, no? prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, SIGTERM); or similar will fix this.

  $ man prctl
  man: No entry for prctl in the manual.

Maybe more linux will slop into POSIX and thence into OpenBSD in the fullness of time?

> In case anyone is looking for it, the fix is "bind-key -T root S-Enter send-keys C-j"

I was looking, thank you!

Yeah or just use Ctrl + J

Interesting, for me `shift+enter` hasnt worked, but `option+enter` does give me new lines in Claude Code's promptbox inside tmux on MacOS.

Interesting. I’ve just been using ‘\ + enter’

I just use Ctrl-g to open the prompt in emacs.

You can just use Ctrl + J

What does shift-enter do for you?

Maybe some keybind in a software. Another mentions Claude code, so it may be used to enter new line where enter is bound to send the prompt.

Terminal programs don’t see key events. It’s all text. I just checked st (suckless) code and the RETURN key will send “\r” aka carriage return. Control+j is “\n” or line feed.

Or if you want to avoid having to set new bindings, do '\ + enter' (which escapes the enter).

I ended up with this: bind -n S-Enter send-keys Escape '[13;2u'

pi.dev keeps complaining that "set -s extended-keys on" is missing, but it still works :D

Guys, did you know about tmux control mode? It tells the host terminal to treat tmux tabs as actual tabs in the terminal. That means that things like scrollback, tab navigation, copy paste, keyboard shortcuts, etc are all handled natively, and you can visually see all your tmux tabs! It doesn't have great support across all terminals, but it does work great in iTerm 2.

Try `tmux -CC` in iTerm.

For a tmux novice like me, this was a total game changer :)

Holy carp.

this is the only reason i use a mac and in a decade no open source linux terminal has ever implemented this to my knowledge

I have in https://github.com/lmorg/ttyphoon

I actually don’t like control mode much though. It’s a terrible protocol. Absolutely abysmal design which leads to a plethora of edge case bugs.

At some point I’ll replace tmux control mode entirely but for the moment it solves the immediate problem.

interesting, i am trying to install it to give it a try. the features in ttyphoon look very promising.

unfortunately the build now fails with "frontend.go:39:12: pattern all:frontend/dist: no matching files found"

i am also a bit taken aback by the many dependencies. with heightened risk of supplychain attacks and dependency failures that feels a bit scary.

> unfortunately the build now fails with "frontend.go:39:12: pattern all:frontend/dist: no matching files found"

How are you trying to build it? Are you calling make? Also what OS are you on?

    make build

> i am also a bit taken aback by the many dependencies. with heightened risk of supplychain attacks and dependency failures that feels a bit scary.

Yeah, I agree with you there. Most of my projects are very conservative with their dependencies; as was this one too, originally. But this project was just too large for one person to realistically manage on their own and without reusing the hard work of other libraries.

Unfortunately, the two libraries I need to lean on the most are exactly the kind of libraries that will have big dependency trees:

- GUI (Wails): just because there is a huge amount of code required to draw anything to screen

- AI (langchaingo/mcp-go): though mostly for tool use here but they’re optional

Both of these libraries were chosen because they are well maintained and have a high number of contributors/eyeballs On the code. But, as you said, the risk is still there.

i have fedora. and yes, i am running make build.

why did you choose wails btw? did you look at fyne? it's go-native and it seems to have a lot less dependencies.

can the AI integration be turned off? i am not going to use it myself.

is there a chatroom where we can talk through debugging my build problem? github issues? you didn't turn in the discussion forum for ttyphoon like you did for murex. or is there another place where you hang out? hn is not exactly the ideal place to talk through dev issues.

An earlier build used SDL directly. There were reasons I didn’t choose Fyne and that was basically that the effort wasn’t much less than working directly with SDL due to various (potentially self imposed) constraints.

I then switched to Wails because I wanted to add Markdown, Jupyter support. And other things too. Quickly I realised it was too much for me to attempt SDL (even just the markdown parser proved an annoying time sink) on my own. I think the terminal itself is worse for change so there might be a point when I revisit this switch and change my mind again.

There was a brief period when both Wails and SDL were supported front ends. The idea being you could chose one based on a Go compiler tag. But that proved hard to maintain.

There was also a time when the terminal was SDL and Wails just did the markdown stuff. They were different applications that passed messages via a rudimentary IPC. But that resulted in a multi-window hacky mess.

So the current design is the compromise I’ve settled on but will likely change my mind at some point again.

As for the AI, there isn’t any compiler flags to disable it. But it doesn’t work without you supplying an API key anyway. And the integration is just a few menu items so, hopefully, not intrusive. Which would also make it pretty easy to hide those options behind a compiler flag.

I’m happy to chat as a GitHub issue if you’d prefer. I don’t hang out in may other places these days (time constraints)

thanks for those details. your approach is very pragmatic and i appreciate that.

on AI, i am not concerned about a few menu items, but if we want to consider supply chain attacks as a risk, the less that gets downloaded and built, the better.

i'll open an issue then, i figure this is more for the benefit of other users of ttyphoon, and since this post is originally about tmux we are already off topic anyways.

The control mode feature was implemented by the developer of iTerm2 for iTerm2: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode

Wezterm has some support for it on nightly.

Was about the mention this, -CC has been working perfectly for me

so THAT's what -CC does...

work in ghostty yet?

Not yet

Very cool. Opening the tmux session in a new tab rather than a new window was an improvement that I wanted when I tried this. Here's how to do it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/54756013/22828008

For me, this is missing

    bind-key -n M-n new-window
    bind-key -n M-1 select-window -t :1
    bind-key -n M-2 select-window -t :2
    bind-key -n M-3 select-window -t :3
    bind-key -n M-4 select-window -t :4
    bind-key -n M-5 select-window -t :5
    bind-key -n M-6 select-window -t :6
    bind-key -n M-7 select-window -t :7
    bind-key -n M-8 select-window -t :8
    bind-key -n M-9 select-window -t :9

To switch around quick. So on my system I've got Super-{1-9} for workspaces, Alt-{1-9} for tmux panes.

Also if you want a vi-like copy mode (where you can select and copy stuff) that opens using Alt-/:

    bind-key -n M-/ copy-mode
    set -g status-keys vi
    set-window-option -g mode-keys vi

    # v to trigger selection
    bind-key -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
    
    # wl-copy if you use wayland
    # mouse selection in copy mode to copy
    bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "wl-copy"
    # y to copy
    bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "wl-copy"

And btw, Ctrl-Shift-v to paste system clipboard

You can also put the config into ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf

edit: And if you want a powerline-style design:

    set -g pane-border-style "fg=colour252"
    set -g pane-active-border-style "fg=colour25"
    set -g status-style "bg=default,fg=default"
    set -g status-left "#[fg=colour231,bg=colour25,bold] #S #[fg=colour25,bg=default,nobold]"
    set -g status-right "#[fg=colour67,bg=default]#[fg=colour231,bg=colour67] %Y-%m-%d  %H:%M #[fg=colour25,bg=colour67]#[fg=colour231,bg=colour25,bold] #h "
    setw -g window-status-format "#[fg=colour243,bg=default] #I  #W "
    setw -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=colour28,bg=default,reverse]#[fg=colour231,bg=colour28,bold,noreverse] #I  #W #[fg=colour28,bg=default,noreverse]"

Requires powerline-fonts

For the "pretty" argument - sure, why not, but as to changing keybinds... Well, it's like this: ^a is for screen, ^b is for tmux. You can remap everything to your taste, but you're not going to build tmux muscle memory. You're going to remember your own, erm, thing. Why does this matter? For a localhost admin it doesn't, but if you work on many systems, often either fresh or not your own, you need to be agile and you're not going to have the time or opportunity to drop your own dotfiles, plus the systems will be locked down, offline or both, and so it pays off to learn the tool at its defaults. Why nicm went for %/" I will never understand, but he did, and that's that. After screen I had X and Xpra and and Terminator at hand for nearly two decades straight and couldn't be bothered moving to tmux, and when I did, I was considering remapping it to Terminator, but I resisted, and I don't regret it. My personal config has some colours, notably different background for the active pane, a UNIX timestamp clock and mouse on and some buffer and title tweaks, but no keybind changes. But to each their own.

I had my tmux customized to the point I forgot how to use it on a clean install which is a problem when I'm sshing into a server.

I wish it had better defaults but now I run it as is. After a while you get used to it. The only thing I always have to change is the mouse scroll and my brain cannot retain the exact command.

Why not just `scp ~/.tmux.conf remotehost:`?

Sometimes I ssh into a server as a specific user (e.g. as the "app" user that is used to run a web app), sometimes only root is available (probably not best practice, but it's not like I can or want to fix it myself).

In any case it's not practical to carry your dotfiles everywhere you go. Changes are also a hassle to propagate

I can't speak for the parent, but I rarely login to the same remote server twice and don't want to need to set things up and clean them up anytime I do. This is why I try to keep my stuff as close to vanilla as possible. If anything goes wrong on a server and someone sees I have a whole bunch of dot files to customize my config, it becomes a red herring that I have to spend time explaining away.

If only we had ways to automate repeating processes… oh well

No, wanting to keep things vanilla when you're dealing with lots of random servers is a valid concern. Just because you can solve this with shell scripting doesn't mean you should.

You could always copy the config to /tmp and use the -f flag.

Because I'm not the owner of the remote host.

Do you have a "dot files" repo? It would contain things like this, config files for tmux, zsh, <other tools>, etc.

That may work for a server or two but doesn't really pan out for fleet management.

Volunteer to be the official image maintainer - I had emacs-nox and (screen) installed fleet wide for my own utility :)

I had a friend that even had his public keys added to the /root/.ssh/ but I didin't go that far -I didn't even put my own .emacs out - but I at least could use good tools to look at the tcpdump output or giant log files if needed. "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping" is not that big of a deal anymore.

And if people want to just use some default open source image, just point out that in modern cloud environments, you don't want each node to customize itself, you want to pre-run that process one time per node type in your "directed graph of image delta pipelines" which takes the input image and publishes the cloud ready app-specific images (with your DNS configs, LDAP integration, whatever, plus emacs/neovim and screen/tmux :)

This will definitely work, but it's not really even necessary. Just have some pre-connect script, that checks if the host is already "configured", and if not, then one-shot some Ansible playbook (or bash even) that installs what's needed. Use /tmp if root is not available. Also works for Kubernetes, though there we have better options.

One of my favs: https://github.com/nicolaka/netshoot

Is it not just easier to accept the default config?

> I had my tmux customized to the point I forgot how to use it on a clean install which is a problem when I'm sshing into a server.

I had the same issue with gnu emacs… but at some point i lost my very custom configuration when the disk broke… i resorted to use a mostly-vanilla emacs :)

I've hit this problem multiple times. The approach which finally eased this pain point for me was to take care to not overwrite any tmux defaults with my config, and only add non-conflicting configs (new shortcuts, styling changes, etc.) That way, if I need to use tmux on a new or unfamiliar machine, the core functionality is still present, and I just miss the candy that comes with customization.

For example, leave the existing prefix binding (ctrl-b), but also add something nicer for day-to-day use (ctrl-space or similar).

"Claude, scp my tmux config over to that box"

God I hope this is a joke

I think of this as the curse of Emacs. Infinitely configurable, thereafter entirely unique in the universe, which can be a double edged sword. See too (maybe it's the same thing) The Lisp Curse.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450973

Total opposite. I adapt to the defaults meaning I almost never customize anything. Tmux? Game controls? UI look? Default. I am almost never met with surprise unless I am sitting in front of someones OCD config.

I've been thoroughly impressed with tmux control mode[0] in iTerm2. This lets you manage remote terminal windows with your local window management provider. It is currently in the process of being implemented in ghostty[1] as well, can't wait!

[0] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode

[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/1935#issuecomm...

> Less awkward prefix keys

> Probably the most common change among tmux users is to change the prefix from the rather awkward C-b to something that’s a little more accessible.

I like the awkwardness of the default prefix key. I have almost never activated it by accident.

> Intuitive Split Commands

> Another thing I personally find quite difficult to remember is the pane splitting commands." to split vertically and % to split horizontally just doesn’t work for my brain.

This is super intuitive to me. two ' in parallel means splitting horizontally. two ° split by an almost horizontal line means splitting vertically.

> Easy Config Reloads

I reloaded config over a few hundreds of times in my first week learning tmux a decade ago. I only reloaded config once in the last 5 years if I recall correctly. It's not something you should memorize.

> I like the awkwardness of the default prefix key.

I am 100% in agreement with you. It takes all of 5 seconds to add:

       unbind-key -T prefix C-b
       set-option -g prefix C-s

To your .tmux.conf on your local laptop (where I use tmux 99.99% of the time) - without worrying about conflicting on that once-in-one-year event where you start up tmux remotely.

I read "tmux 2: mouse-free productivity" in a weekend years ago and it may be, pound-for-pound, one of the more impactful books on my productivity.

Seems like they are keeping up-to-date too: https://bookshop.org/p/books/tmux-3-productive-mouse-free-de...

The book doesn't mention the author of tmux or its origins even once :(

I believe that book would be called: "History of Tmux"

Thanks for the reference.

This book is fantastic!

But ... Why not link to the Pragmatic Programmer page for it? https://pragprog.com/titles/bhtmux3/tmux-3-productive-mouse-...

I love tmux! It's perfectly usable! You only need a 400-line custom-built configuration file[1]!

[1] https://doc.xn0.org/.tmux.conf

Disclaimer: I am being silly but serious. tmux is absolutely not user-friendly out of the box. It is, however, extremely nice after an absurd amount of tweaking, which is either an endorsement or a damning, depending on your perspective.

Mine is only a few lines copied from jcs’s one.

https://github.com/jcs/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf

I’ve only reverted the prefix binding back.

I include lines at the top of my own https://andrew-quinn.me/tmux-conf.txt to make it easy to download no matter what kind of box I find myself on.

    # Mindless copy and paste command:
    #
    #   # Standard Linux / GNU tools
    #   wget -O ~/.tmux.conf https://andrew-quinn.me/tmux-conf.txt
    #   curl -fsSL https://andrew-quinn.me/tmux-conf.txt -o ~/.tmux.conf
    #   busybox wget -q -O ~/.tmux.conf https://andrew-quinn.me/tmux-conf.txt
    # [... many, many others]

The Windows PowerShell one is aspirational and manifesting. I should add some angel numbers to it to hyperstition more of what I want to see into the world.

I dunno. I have yet to change any tmux settings, but I find it perfectly usable.

I guess it depends on what you want out of it. I’ve memorized about nine shortcuts, and that’ll all I’ve ever needed: ctrl+b and c, n, p, s, d, $, ‘,’, or PageUp/PageDown

I like having a red bar for tmux running as root and a blue one for running it as a normal user, e.g. for root:

    set -g status-style "bg=red"

I also like to have the bar on top and the status centered:

    set -g status-justify absolute-centre
    set -g status-position top

I change the color of the bar in every server I've set it up so I know absolutely where I am.

Aren't you going to run out of colors to pick?

My approach is to color ssh sessions to prod servers red, less dangerous servers orange, my own non shared computers blue.

Do you use this when running tmux remotely?

(I only run it in my own machines so it never runs as root anyway)

If you're interested in an out of the box multiplexer. https://zellij.dev/ is great. I've been using it for about a year now and loving it.

Your out of the box isn't my out of the box. Tmux is in main on OpenBSD, where it started.

I read "out of box" as meaning "has sensible defaults, can be used 'out of the box' without configuration".

I've never seen it used to mean "preinstalled on most systems". Although e.g. people like vi keybindings because vi is preinstalled on most systems.

Either way, I think you can argue for workstations, it's worth configuring software to your liking, and worth installing software that helps you be productive.

Though, the only software I've seen people excuse for having 'bad defaults' have been things like vim, emacs, tmux.

I highly recommend just turning the mouse on, it's amazing for resizing panels and the rightclick menu is nice.

  set -g mouse on

for multi-monitor setups

  setw -g aggressive-resize on

is also really nice.

Honestly, this is the only configuration I need.

Wish they could make this default, not sure why they haven't.

xterm, probably

a lot of servers use tmux which probably has some weird broken edge cases

One nice thing about tmux is it also supports include files in its config.

This lets you put your theme colors in a different file, such as `source-file "~/.config/tmux/theme.conf"` and then your theme switching external script or tool can symlink a specific theme's tmux file to that path.

That's what I do in my dotfiles:

    # Main tmux config
    https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/tmux/tmux.conf

    # One of the theme files
    https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/themes/tokyonight-moon/tmux.conf

It allows for hot-reloading different themes as well.

My two favorite tmux QoL improvements are enabling seamless navigation between neovim and tmux (there are many plugins but i use this one https://github.com/aserowy/tmux.nvim) and extrakto which lets you fuzzy select anything in the tmux buffer and insert into the cursor or copy it to the clipboard. (https://github.com/laktak/extrakto)

I prefer to hide the status bar entirely, and use an fzf-powered named window switcher to navigate between windows.

https://github.com/cmpadden/dotfiles/blob/6e767691a6b1295260...

I've used ` as prefix for years now. Considering how often you switch windows/panes, I reckon using a single character has saved me hours per year. :D

It rarely conflicts with whatever I'm doing, but I have a binding to temporarily switch it to `C-a` and back, which I almost never use.

Oh, and I've used this themepack[1] for years as well.

Actually, here's my config[2] if someone finds it useful. I can't claim ownership of it, and probably stole it from somewhere I don't remember anymore.

BTW, the author's site https://rootloops.sh/ is certainly... something. :)

[1]: https://github.com/jimeh/tmux-themepack

[2]: https://gist.github.com/imiric/9bd3e5b7fc5e1468d05abc674f42e...

I use c-q for prefix key because it doesn’t conflict with common zsh and vim bindings.

Because the author suggested swapping caps lock and control key, I also recommend mapping escape key at the control key and change the behavior based on whether another key is pressed. For example, if you press control + a, it sends c-a, but if you only press control key and then release, it sends escape. It makes your vim life (and in general) a lot easier. You don’t have to compete the most variable real estate on the keyboard, right next to the A key.

For most bindings like moving, resizing, and splitting,I emulate vim bindings.

Also, -r flag for bind-key command is impotent, because it enables to repeat commands like changing the pane size or move focus. You don’t have to press prefix key each time.

If you want to get fancy look with minimal setting, use plugins like nord tmux theme.

There’s many ways tmux could be used, but when it is part of IDE the most important usability tweaks that make tmux rock for me personally are:

— session configuration save/recall (with pane layout for each tab and directory for each pane[0]),

— nvim integration (for seamless split navigation and so that I can create or reattach to a tmux session in an nvim float, even though that nvim usually runs inside tmux),

— a bind to force-reload a pane if (when!) a command hangs.

For switching between tabs, I find that the ideal bind is simply Cmd + pane number. There’s never more than ten tabs that I’d often want to switch to within a single session. The highest number is probably four tabs. Each tab is typically assigned a high-level part of the project.

[0] I always forget what terminology a given multiplexer uses, so let’s just call them “panes” and “tabs”.

One way to make tmux way more usable is to use tmux-fingers, which provides hint-based mouse-free copypaste capabilities

https://github.com/morantron/tmux-fingers

(disclaimer: I'm the developer of the plugin)

Could never get mouse copy to work well (using mac at moment). When I make text selection, selects yellow and upon release goes to terminal prompt. I had one config work at one point and it kept selecting from all panes, not just one the one I'm in. Any ideas?

Try iterm2 which has mouse reporting

This is also why i gave up on it. Don't want to install iTerm either, more blaot.

Ctrl-a interferes with readline shortcuts. I've been using Ctrl-<Space>: nothing, as far as I know, binds to that.

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

I’ve been using Ctrl-s for years. Nothing else uses it because it’s historically been used for terminal flow control, but that doesn’t really have much use in a graphical terminal with history and scrollbars and so I’ve never missed it. Has similar two-finger ergonomics to the Ctrl-a bind as well.

edit: oh, and I think Ctrl-space is the keystroke to get a nul character, and vi uses that character to insert the last entered piece of text in insert mode. It looks like Ctrl-@ does the same things, but tmux might not be able to tell the difference either.

Ctrl+s is evil. I can't count how many times I froze my terminal by accident before realizing that Ctrl+q "unfreezes" it. I absolutely support rebinding it.

Same, I used C-a for a while until I found out its default mapping is jumping to the beginning of the line so I rebound tmux prefix to C-Space. Now my only problem is on a few servers where I haven't copied my dotfiles.

I very recently learned that with most readline apps and terminal password inputs, ctrl+u clears the input.

Very handy when you make a typo far into a long password and can't keep track of whether you've mashed backspace enough.

I stopped using tmux when I started using kitty terminal with native split windows. I prefer the native window management of kitty, but I do miss the session saving of tmux (e.g. if I accidentally close a tab).

There are many separate session persistence daemons: dtach, zmx, hauntty, shpool, diss, abduco - take your pick

screen's another nice one. been using it for 25 years, so far so good

I used screen until like 2010 or so -- but you triggered me to look back at it again today. One nicety there now is that you can easily get a dump of what's showing in the pty with screen -S <session_name> -X hardcopy. This is actually somewhat hard to do in tmux, but it's a thing you want your AI agents to do all the time. I'm curious if claude / codex are comfortable with screen, I'll check it out.

but I do miss the session saving of tmux

Interesting...I kinda thought that was 90% of the use case for using tmux.

Recent versions of Kitty have sessions. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/sessions/

I was going to say, but zellij doesn't connect the session to the GUI. However, I did not know about kitty's --use-foreground-process, which doesn't solve the problem completely but may be good enough.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/sessions/#more-complex-sessi...

Check out: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx

It uses libghostty to restore scrollback history and terminal state.

Why make C-a your prefix key? Just because it's the default in 'screen'? I use C-a a lot to go to BOL, just like C-e to go to EOL. I also use C-b a lot with C-f.

The obvious choice is C-z.

You rarely suspend processes and when you do, C-zC-z is pretty quick. For other combos, it pays to have control and z close to each other so that when your little finger and ring finger operate C-z then your other fingers can freely type whatever follows the prefix without having to unwind your fingers back from the keyboard first.

> it pays to have control and z close to each other

Well there you have it, control and z are not close to each other on my keyboard, yet control and a are.

What's your layout?

z near control is standard qwerty layout. you probably have qwertz which is actually less common globally.

but you are right, in your case z is not the right key. choose another. i use o as my main key now, not very close but close enough. alternatives i use and have used are q, s, d, x, and a few others. even ] can work if you have a US keyboard at least. i avoided a and e since they are used on the commandline often. (although elvish doesn't support them by default so that's training me to not need them there)

Hard agree on intuitive splits, I do this as well.

My hotkey is the backtick, `, rather than a chord.

The one thing I still struggle with - because it happens rarely - is easily copying the contents, full or partial, of a particular pane.

Big fan of all of the items mentioned here. I love the "intuitive split commands" -- I'll add that.

For the vim/nvim fans out there, I try my best to add "vim-style" key bindings for navigating between panes, so that e.g. ctrl-h, ctrl-j, ctrl-k, and ctrl-l can be used to move around qukcly. My dotfiles are here:

https://github.com/jay-khatri/dotfiles/blob/main/.tmux.conf

I don't get it. I don't want a 1970s teletype interface in 2026 just to have persistent command line sessions.

Where's the 2026 windowed version that feels exactly like a native terminal/iTerm/ghostty app but keeps sessions alive and lets me reconnect to them, no middle man with Ctrl keys for control.

I know this post will get a lot of hate responses. I don't care. Respond by fax

There's still no such standard. You either provide a terminal API or build a custom client-server app (GUI + backend). The later means there's no place in your setup for terminal apps which expect a TTY interface (emulated by your terminal app). What are you gonna do about that?

Take a look at headless project management in Zed or JetBrains. They do exactly that -- bring clear separation of concerns in a high-level API so that you don't have to mux/demux everything into/from byte stream like terminal applications do.

A good read on the subject https://jyn.dev/the-terminal-of-the-future

I prefer to use tmux non-interactively. For example, I use it for running daemons in the foreground, (textmode) screen scraping and scripting text-only browser

I do almost all interactive work while detached from tmux (personal preference)

I also rely on tmux buffers for a textmode "clipboard". I do not use x11

I've been using tmux since 2011 well before it became popular. I only use a fraction of its features

> I do almost all interactive work while detached from tmux

How come?

I like to have an IBM 3270 style status bar on the bottom.

    set-option -gq status-style "fg=brightblue,overline"

What I don't see discussed is why tmux (and screen) are still a thing, when we have windowed desktops for 40+ years now.

Disconnecting a session's lifetime from the connection's lifetime hardly need such lengthy tutorial.

And displaying and arranging multiple virtual terminals was supposed to be the job of the terminal emulator and the windowing system.

windowed terminals and tabs don't keep their state without something like tmux. and they don't let me have multiple terminals on a remote machine.

only now we are seeing gui terminals to integrate such features: wezterm, ghostty, ttypoon, ... so we are discussing tmux because it took more than 40 years for those features to make it to the gui layer.

The only reason I don't use tmux is because of how annoying it is to look at scrollback. Am I using it wrong?

I would "just" do C-B PgUp and then use vi-like movement keys like hj, gg/G etc., and q to escape the pager, but I realize now that I say it that it doesn't sound very convenient or discoverable.

C-b [ allows you to scroll up/down

One thing that often gets overlooked in the tmux vs. alternatives debate is that tmux's staying power is largely about ubiquity on remote servers. Zellij is great on your local machine where you control the environment, but if you're doing a lot of work via ssh on machines you don't own, tmux is almost certainly already installed. The muscle memory transfers too.

That said, I'd push back on the idea that the default tmux config is just "ugly". The real usability issue is that the keybindings are so divorced from how people intuitively think about splits and windows that even experienced users can't remember them. The visual defaults are just a symptom of the deeper problem that it was designed for someone who already had a mental model built around screen.

My main gripe with tmux is the nested use case (tmux session on my local machine, in which I ssh to another machine, only to tmux attach within the remote machine too). Is there a terminal multiplexer/session daemon that supports nested sessions out of the box with ease?

I wrote quite a bit of configuration to support an "outer" tmux process and "inner" tmux processes on all the remote hosts I have various and different tasks to accomplish. I am not sure how some software would manage these, but in the very least configuring my outer session to use Ctrl+a while the inner one uses Ctrl+b is working well. I have aliases that specify a socket so I can refer to the sessions easily and not get them confused.

Gave up on making it pretty... But my tip is to read the manual so you know what you put in your config instead of just copy paste.

I love tmux, does exactly what I need it to do and doesn't try too hard to make the terminal a place with unicorns and fancy GUI magic.

At some point I switched to "oh my tmux" which seems to cover most of the customisations I needed https://github.com/gpakosz/.tmux

+1 for gpakosz/.tmux which I also wanted to mention here. I have it synced across all machines and a personal .tmux.conf.local that modifies some settings to my liking.

I appreciate that tmux has theoretical advantages over screen, but man does the implementation suck. On Mac it still seems like there's no way to copy text if you have mouse mode on (at least in code-server).

Select copies, what do you mean?

Not for me. Some kind of OSC 52 problem.

Maybe you could try this - https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-yank

I haven't tried it, but it looks like it just calls pbcopy, which won't work in a browser. There's no programmatic way to do it, because tmux can't access the clipboard.

Yeah, that really sucks. I couldn’t quite believe what was the case and spent many hours trying to debug it.

Often, holding down "Shift" while making mouse selections will "break through" and let you get at the O.S. copy/paste/selection mechanism. Highly terminal dependent, though!

Not in browsers, unfortunately. Both my work and Home Assistant OS use tmux in a browser tty, and I have to turn off mouse mode to copy.

I was wondering about tmux vs screen (+splitvt) but didn’t want to ask. What are the advantages?

Through many phases of using tmux, from bare bone to rocking 200-line config not counting 40 packages installed by a package manager, then back to 20 lines .tmux.conf, I'm tired. Tmux is great. Outside of control codes, I don't have any problems since tmux makes it easy to fix them. Except that I'm stuck with it while I watch a super star programmer dude switch to his 4th Konsole window to create his 21st tab and wonder how can I shave off this dependency.

I have used tmux, tmuxup, fzf and direnv to automate my workflow. It's pointed to the work folder, contains a project picker, invokes shell with defaults (npm run dev, python manage.py runserver etc), and fires up cursor - saving a lot of keystrokes for project initialization.

I have written about the process here: https://kashifaziz.me/blog/tmux-dev-workflow/

I gave up on Tmux due to issues w/reboot & session storage not working after.

I used the resurrect and continuum (one to save/restore, the other to save between sessions). Everytime I would reboot, the sessions no longer worked, and I'd have to delete the saved sessions.

Just trying to use Wezterms tabs panels like windows/panels. I don't do the SSH Session save/restore from remote so don't need that feature, and thus not too worried.

Any guides for tmux configuration that works well with Emacs? The use of Ctrl and Meta for basic operations conflicts with a lot of Emacs commands.

My experience is that Emacs wants to be your everything, and works best if you let it. Have you tried putting your terminals inside of Emacs instead of the other way around?

* If you need a "real" terminal emulator, you can use something like vterm (https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm/).

* If you need to be able to attach/detach Emacs sessions on remote machines, you can use something like dtach or abducto (https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/abduco/).

Tmux conflicted with my vim bindings and i tweaked the tmux.conf to fit my needs. It's worth playing around on pure tmux and figuring out what would work for you.

I love that most tmux features are programmatic and unix-oriented.

> # reload config file (change file location to your the tmux.conf you want to use) > bind r source-file ~/.tmux.conf

Just seems fun.

That said, I still use zellij. I like the scroll info, the default bindings, and the fact it plays nicely with my setup of fish+alac. I might swap alacritty with ghostty at some point, but this works for me.

Rebinding C-b to C-a is a necessity for those of us whose muscle memory formed on GNU screen, been doing this for years. I like to set status-right to include host load average, with something akin to:

set -g status-right '#[fg=colour39, bg=colour234]#[fg=colour160] #h #[fg=colour088]avg: #(cat /proc/loadavg|cut -d" " -f1-3) '

I would love to have a way to switch sessions easily, like with panes where I just click or have more shortcuts available

Prefix-w works, or did you want something more?

People have developed plugins for this. Check out “sesh” for instance.

Switching between sessions with fuzzy finding, and creating new ones when needed, is a wonderful feature.

Check out the `choose-tree` and `display-menu` commands.

I use byobu for managing tmux windows and sessions https://www.byobu.org/

i just have a little script called session (invoked as session namespace name and mapping to a tmux session called namespace/name and searching all namespaces if the namespace is elided) that just does the right tmux invocation for the various intersecting cases of [in or not in a tmux session already, target session does or does not exist] which also has the side benefit of leaving shell history breadcrumbs i can follow between sessions later if needed

Here’s a simple session switcher: `bind C-a display-popup -E "tmux list-sessions -F '#{session_name}' | fzf --reverse | xargs tmux switch-client -t"`. No plugins, nothing fancy, just works.

I run tmux inside Termux on my phone to manage a couple of long-running Node projects. It's one of those setups that sounds cursed until you realize it just works. Session persistence is the killer feature when your terminal lives on a device that might close the app at any time.

Though I also customize my tmux setup, the best way to use tmux is just to learn and remember the basics. Once you change the prefix bind or any other basic binds, you will have hard time on a new machine.

Btw, you can place tmux config at ~/.config/tmux/tmux.cong. No reason to clutter home dir.

I would also describe haventerminal.com as making tmux pretty and usable! but without any setup steps, first class support for agents, and management of multiple machines. Disclaimer: It's a macOS app we just launched and it ships its own open source session persistence.

I really really like tmux, probably i'll try Zellij at some point but its always my default on a new server to install tmux, copy oh my tmux and vimrc configs. then voila I have everything. I have to say I feel magical most of the time i'm using it

I've always written my code in vim and preferred CLIs in general, but I really want a GUI for the terminal itself, including tmux. iTerm2 makes it nice for example, even if it's only to use the meta/super key instead of the heavily overloaded control.

I'm constantly fighting with tmux copying. I want it to perform like native copying, but in mouse mode it seems to copy more characters than I want, copy newlines when I don't want them, and doesn't copy to clipboard in tmux-in-tmux situations.

You can use vi copy mode. It makes selection a lot easier.

As a long time user of gnu screen (almost fifteen years now) i still have on my todo list to come up with a tmux config that mimics gnu screen… does somebody know if such a thing exists already?

Btw I don’t strictly believe in a gnu screen superiority, i’m just lazy.

Try https://github.com/ddollar/tmux/blob/master/examples/screen-...

I used tmux for quite some time, and just stopped using it one day. I realized that whatever tmux brings can be done better by a good terminal.

I also hated dealing with all the wrong colors, escape character support, missing chars and messed up terminal buffers

Wezterm for examples has panes in addition of tabs and scriptable enough (lua) that you can session management:

https://fredrikaverpil.github.io/blog/2024/10/20/session-man...

Most modern terminals have a built-in multiplexing anyway. When you use tmux, you're essentially using a terminal emulator on top of a terminal emulator.

my favorite thing to do with tmux is using a sessionizer script[0] (credit for the idea/original implementation goes to ThePrimeagen). allows for fzf-ing my projects and creating a separate session for each one. especially handy for bouncing around when working on features/fixes that span multiple repos

for (neo)vim users, flattening vim splits and tmux panes into the same level for switching with ctrl+hjkl is handy too

[0](https://github.com/tolly-xyz/dotfiles/blob/main/.local%2Fbin...)

The tricky part for me is getting it to behave with other fancy TUI stuff. eg both tmux and neovim stuff want to use the bottom row in terminal and neither seem to have the intelligence built in to compensate

> Published on Aug 17, 2015 > Last updated on Oct 2, 2024

Why now?

At least some of the links in it don't mention plugins (which luckily some comments here do). Beside tmux-continuum and tmux-sensible, I'd recommend jaclu/tmux-menus.

I remember running ssh to connect to a mainframe and starting gnu screen remotely right after watching the matrix. And I've used it ever since.

All these newage tmux hippie yuppies can get off my lawn.

I'm perfectly happy with tmux the way it is, but upvoting this one because it's a decent overview of what to modify to make tmux more better if you don't like its defaults.

Did they fix being able to select text without a ton of empty spaces across multiple lines, and being able to use the mousewheel as effectively as a non-multiplexed terminal?

I love tmux but one thing which really annoys me is the fact that I cannot use the mouse wheel or the scroll back to see the previous content. I know there are shortcuts to go forward and back but I always forget them and they are not easily accessible on my keyboard and cumbersome.

I think the mouse wheel is mapped by default if you `set mouse on`? I also additionally map Shift-PageUp/Down in my config. And recently they added a `pane-scrollbars` option for a clickable ASCII scrollbar.

Thanks! I works. I modified my ~/.tmux.conf file to be like this:

# Activate mouse mode

set -g mouse on

# Enter copy mode and scroll up with PageUp

bind-key -n Pageup copy-mode -u

# Scroll down with PageDown; if at the bottom, it will exit copy mode automatically

bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Pagedown send-keys -X page-down

bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Pageup send-keys -X page-up

I don't see what's awkward about C-b and %.

No mention of replacing the weird-ass emacs thing on [ with proper vim bindings?

I ended up AI-slopcoding myself a small shell script for the few things I need from tmux: https://gist.github.com/dmitriid/523a5229c9a17a1cf4ad9182f4c...

I just couldn't be bothered to remember all the prefixed commands :)

Another easy to use option is using byobu (https://github.com/dustinkirkland/byobu).

I have been using byobu for almost a decade now and it never let me down.

I almost never bother theming things on my computer; I usually don't really care about how things look and I can't be bothered with it.

I have two exceptions to this: NeoVim and tmux.

tmux in particular looks very ugly out of the box; I'm not sure why they decided to have a bright green bar on the bottom (presumably to be high-contrast in a low color terminal), but I really hate staring at it all day (since I kind of live in tmux most of the day on both my work and personal computer). I have it set as close as I can to the Wombat color scheme that's built into emacs (and which can be easily added to Vim), because I personally have always felt that that was the most pleasant theme to stare at for long periods of time.

Another thing I do is set the prefix key to backtick. I have no idea why I started doing this, but at this point I'm too geriatric to change, and I still greatly prefer this over ctrl-b. The only issue I've had is when I need to do code blocks in markdown, but I've just gotten used to hitting backtick twice when I need to actually use a backtick.

feels wrong to scp a dotfile to a server you only touch once

Worth mentioning my tmux llm chat helper sidechat: https://github.com/day50-dev/sidechat

I use it every day.

i used to use tmux a lot when i used to develop on arch, since i moved to macos i never installed it.

tbh i even forgot what it used to buy me.

I've had the ctrl-a setup ever since migrating from screen to tmux, just due to muscle memory. But it is more conveniently located than ctrl-b - it's also rather nice if I have multiple nested layers of tmux due to temporary ones on other hosts. Sure you can just keep repeating the bind, but, just remembering that the second layer uses ctrl-b is a bit more convenient I feel. Slows me down a little, but usually I'm not using the 2nd layer as much.

I don't use capslock for ctrl though. It's much too useful as the Compose key ;)

the most tmux thing in the world is that "make tmux usable" is still a genre.

Try byobu

Make tmux cut/paste work on mac terminal.app so I don't have to install iterm2 bloatware.

I select with mouse and paste to wherever, works every time?

How can it not work? I think the only even loosely relevant setting on my .tmux.conf is: set -g mouse on

It's the non mouse stuff i want. It's a known problem with a lot of "try this" approaches to fixing but no categorical answer. Nothing wrong with mice but keyboards have a role too.

Just use smux.dev

set-option -g prefix C-x

has been working for me for years

nice update on tmux

that's pretty nice, but did you try cmux.com

OP doesn't seem to be on Mac

Even if they are, cmux isn't an alternative to tmux, as it can't attach to/detach from sessions, which is usually the whole reason to use tmux.

iTerm2 gives you that then. I use it every day at work. Idk why there's no equivalent for Linux.

That's a totally different thing. Native macOS app vs portable terminal multiplexer. My main use case for tmux is detaching and re-attaching to a session on a remote server, for which it's extremely useful.

I've been building a tmux wrapper that is similar you might be interested in. https://jmux.build

That's what I tell people who keep telling me to try cmux. It's false advertising to say it's like tmux. No, Zellij, sure. But not this. I will hold onto tmux forever and you'll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

what does it add over screen which i don't even need to install?

If screen crashes you lose the sessions, Tmux maintains state.

Screen does not have UTF8 support, tmux does.

Otherwise just a bunch of more sane original defaults in tmux to make things much familiar.

In 2026 if given a choice between screen and tmux to use/learn, most are going to go with tmux.

> Screen does not have UTF8 support, tmux does.

“‘-U’

Run screen in UTF-8 mode. This option tells screen that your terminal sends and understands UTF-8 encoded characters. It also sets the default encoding for new windows to ‘utf8’.”

— <https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/screen.html#Invok...>

“Command: defutf8 state

(none) Same as the ‘utf8’ command except that the default setting for new windows is changed. Initial setting is on if screen was started with ‘-U’, otherwise off.”

— <https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/screen.html#Chara...>

Which does not work correctly for Korean, Japanese, Chinese, I think Thai, and a few more with somewhat ambiguous character widths.

This can lead to ghost characters that aren't shown, overlapping characters, etc.

It was an attempt to bolt on UTF8 support, but it's not great.

cmux? I don't know and it's not even a good comparison.

tmux? https://www.google.com/search?q=tmux+vs+screen

hm, seems i misunderstood something

I actually asked chatgpt to recommend me a great starter tmux conf, and it gave me 80% of this blog post. Not an insult btw.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com