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Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

You might want to consider tmux (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/) as an alternative. Its cleaner (and, incidentally, BSD-licensed) codebase means that it's getting features that have been gathering dust on screen's to-do list for ages. Most notably, its dwm/XMonad-style layouts (http://tmux.sourceforge.net/tmux6.png) are really nice. AFAICT, screen doesn't even officially have vertically split windows yet, it's still an unofficial patch.

Either way, if you use Unix, learn to use screen or tmux. They're tremendouslyuseful. (Also: Noisy wireless connections are the new flaky dialup, when it comes to resuming shell sessions.)

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No offense, but how does it's BSD-licensed codebase mean that it 'gets more features'?

I rephrased my comment - I think it's the cleaner codebase that makes the big difference. Its BSD license has some perks, though - for one thing, it's part of the OpenBSD base system now, which means security auditing and excellent maintainers. That will probably also lead to more features in the long run.

OpenBSD man page: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=tmux

I was able to make tmux hang in a matter of a few minutes of playing with it (and not even trying hard). It's definitely got promise, but it also still has a way to go.

Can you reproduce it, or describe what you did? In a couple months of using it constantly on three systems, I've never had a single problem with it.

Started tmux, split the window a few times, ^B <space> a few times, and it hung. I've submitted a sample to the developer. (It's getting stuck somewhere around screen_write_copy.)

Thanks, I will look at that, looks rad! I just thought the article covered some really key points about multiplexing terminals in general...

What does 'looks rad' mean ?

pardon me, I meant to say that it (tmux) looks neat and useful!

Ah :)

Sorry, I felt a little old there for a second.

"Rad" hasn't really been in widespread use since the '80s.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rad

Basically short for 'radical' and a replacement for 'awesome' or 'cool.'

tmux is not rad, just clean -- see http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/neercs for a truly radical screen replacement:

  Grab a process that you forgot to start inside neercs
  Great screensaver
  Real time thumbnails of your shells
  Special effects when closing a window
  Various window layouts...

How does any of this work when through putty or when connecting to X-less unices from the myriad of non-Unix boxes out there?

At least click the link. It is all done in ascii art.

I rather like the fact it uses the WTFPL, too. It's not really a replacement for something like tmux, though, from what I've seen.

How does that compare to dvtm?

http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/

Interesting. I haven't heard of that before, I'll look into it. I doubt a comparison based on a first impression would be useful, though.

Nice piece of software.

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