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Comment by thelarry | Hacker News Reader

Should i finally switch from screens to tmux?

You're going to open a big can of worms with that one ;). Tmux has quite a few more features than Screen, with Screen having a few features that are useful in edge cases[1]. It's hard to argue with tmux having bindings for vi/Emacs, as well.

If you're on a mac and use iTerm2, using tmux is somewhat of a no-brainer, thanks to the integration between tmux and iTerm2[2].

1: http://sourceforge.net/p/tmux/tmux-code/ci/master/tree/FAQ 2: https://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration

With reflowing text added to tmux, and giving that "Lots and lots of bug fixes, fixing memory-leaks, etc." the benefit of the doubt, then I would say that unless you have a specific use case of screen (and if you do, you know it) then you should be using tmux.

After mastering screen, I switched to tmux. It's a lot easier to configure. It's also a lot nicer to split panes etc...

Definitely recommend the switch. You might be dreading it, but two days into tmux you won't regret it. It took many weeks trying to convince myself screen is better until I actually tried tmux out.

I switched from screen to tmux to screen back again.

tmux seemed slower while switching windows, plus I like the simplicity of screen.

I was a heavy screen user for years, and 'simple' is not what I would use to describe screen.

Using tmux 1.8 and switching between windows is super fast.

Yes, you definitely should, just make sure to plop this into your .tmux.conf

    unbind C-b
    set -g prefix C-a

No, don't. C-b is a much better shortcut than C-a.

I agree, am i the only one using C-a in bash?

Perhaps a nice C-f then?

actually i'm using M+n (M=alt, n=number) to switch windows and i use M+[hjkl] to switch to left right top down window

I recommend the backtick: `

The only two pains that come with it are a) having to type `` to get a single `, and b) pasting anything containing a backtick behaves as if you'd typed it out.

I unbind M-Space from my window manager and use that for my prefix as well as for jumping to last window.

You should have switched a long time ago, but now is as good a time as any :P

I've loved tmux since I switched a couple of years ago. Try it out for a few weeks. I think you'll like it better than screen.

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