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Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

That was my problem with tmux. I don't really care for vsplit (and could've had that with screen patches), so feature-wise there's no big difference. Some version of screen is often pre-installed on servers, so that's probably my first choice when it comes to situations where running things in the background is my prime motivation. For multiplexing on my home system that's not an issue, so both would be fine.

I recently started trying out tmux for that purpose as someone told me its memory usage wasn't as creeping. Can't really detect a big difference, though, after a while both of them take up a few hundred megs.

Not close to the vim vs. emacs holy war level. More like emacs vs. xemacs.

Or did I miss some hidden gems of either of them?

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There's a feature that I've discovered recently that makes vertical split a lot more useful. It's PREFIX+z. it maximises the current pane. This means you can use mouse to select-copy without spanning multiple panes. Then you can do PREFIX+z to return to panes.

    > did I miss some hidden gems of either of them?

They're pretty similar. I think I moved to tmux because it was easier to get going in openbsd.

An odd advantage I've found for it - there's a great book - Pragmatic Guide to Tmux. It's very thin, yet contained all of the features I thought I wanted, and a couple of more that I didn't know about (including the z thing from above). I like books that are both thin and yet contain everything I want.

Heh. My reason from screen is the exact opposite. It's easier to be available on all servers i ever connect to... which is why i won't care for those features anytime soon.

With PREFIX+z, you have changed my life for the better. Thanks!

> Or did I miss some hidden gems of either of them?

My three favorite features of Screen are ones the Tmux devs are strongly against adding.

* Digraphs

* Serial terminal

* Nethack mode

Digraphs are mostly for portability - when ssh-ing from OSX or Windows, I don't need to learn their compose combos. Do "^a ^V | c" and there is a ¢ symbol. It would be nice if the digraph support came from a config file, so new ones could be added.

A while back I hacked up a script for doing digraphs in tmux. It's not precisely equivalent to screen's digraph support, but it does the job and (given that it's just a Python script) can be easily extended.

http://paste.pound-python.org/show/6aCbTG3lKgCWdrRygkBG/

I enjoy how readable tmux conf files are. My screenrc is barely legible without the manual open in another shell. I mean, I guess it doesn't matter too much once you've got it working. But I never open my tmux.conf and ask myself wtf is going on.

tmux uses a client-server model. This runs into issues on OSX because when the server detaches it loses context within the window manager and then launching (e.g.) MacVim from that tmux session will cause the window manager Copy-Paste to stop working (because the OS doesn't think the process has the requisite access level).

On the other hand, it makes it a lot easier for multiple people to connect to the same tmux session. In GNU screen (at least prior versions), there was an explicit check for 'uid == 0' before allowing some of the screen-sharing features (iirc). This meant that even if you chmod'd all of the sockets/ttys that needed it, screen would still refuse to operate in that mode unless the process was setuid root.

That does suck, but there is `reattach-to-user-namespace` in homebrew which keeps the tmux server from doing that

Funny you mention vim vs emacs.

tmux also supports vi keybinds, big selling point over screen IMO.

> tmux also supports vi keybinds, big selling point over screen IMO.

I guess this solidifies me good and well in the screen/emacs camp :)

Tmux has emacs-like bindings turned on by default, so don't be afraid. =)

emacs & tmux get along a lot better than emacs & screen

I glanced at a couple screen manuals. Looks like both tmux and screen support rebinding all the commands.

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