If you want to get a taste of the benefits of tmux without having to learn anything new, I recommend using iTerm and setting up an alias for

  'ssh [your server] -t "tmux -CC attach || tmux -CC"'

Just running that command will connect to your server and attach to an existing tmux session, or create a new one if needed, and make use of iTerm's tmux integration, so you can use the standard macOS keyboard commands (or the UI) to do things like switch tabs, make new tabs, close them, make new windows, etc. all using tmux and a single ssh connection. You can press 'esc' in the command window to detach from your session and when you return (just using that alias) all your work is just as you left it.

I use a tool called tummy (https://github.com/minhajuddin/tummy full disclosure: built by me) which allows me to create a Tmuxfile per project. A typical file looks like this:

  session "liveform"
  directory "/home/minhajuddin/r/liveform/frontend"

  window "src", [
    pane("vim TODO"),
  ]

  window "server-pry", [
    pane("puma --port 3000 --config <(echo '')"),
    pane("rails c", :horizontal),
  ]

  window "play", [
    pane("git status"),
  ]

  window "misc", [
    pane("sidekiq"),
    #pane("httpdebug", :horizontal),
    pane("cd ~/s/html; fs", :horizontal),
    pane("guard", :horizontal),
  ]

  # vim: filetype=ruby

  require "tummy/version"

  module Tummy
    # Your code goes here...
  end

To me tmux, like a lot of tools, suffers from bad defaults that makes it less enjoyable to use. One example is not being able to scroll with a mouse. I usually find someone's tmux.conf online and use it, but always run into strange problems that I don't have the energy figuring out. My current conf suffers from the navigation bar going completely black when I try to rename a pane (can't see what i'm typing).

Really wish more tools took care into making solid defaults and not assuming all users are like the ones on their mailing lists.

I use Byobu (http://byobu.co/), which is a configuration layer over tmux. It's tmux with nicely packaged features.

If you use tmux and vim, and if you run tests, then you must look at janko-m/vim-test and vim-dispatch. Runs any test seamlessly in the background.

Vim-dispatch also has the best intro video to anything ever ;)

https://vimeo.com/63116209

I'll give a shout-out to DVTM ( http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm ) which I've been using successfully for a couple of years.

Prior to that I used tmux for a few years, and screen before that. I suppose the only compelling reason to use DVTM is that it acts like a tiling WM, so if you use one (I use XMonad http://xmonad.org ) the experience is basically the same (mod-h/mod-l to resize, mod-j/mod-k to navigate windows, mod-space to switch layout, etc.).

The main reason I switched is my preference to avoid bloat. DVTM doesn't do everything tmux and screen do, it only does window management. I use dtach ( http://dtach.sourceforge.net ) for persistence. I previously used abduco ( http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/abduco ), but it segfaulted on me a couple of times (months apart, in a non-reproducible way); haven't tried it for about a year, so it might have stabilised.

I use st ( http://st.suckless.org ) as my terminal, again to avoid bloat.

I've used screen for darn near 20 years now. Have tried to switch to tmux, but even with screen-like keybindings, I end up running into something[0] that makes me switch back because screen is just muscle memory for me at this point.

[0] like switching to a non-existent-numbered screen to get a list of which ones I do have...

Does anyone run tmux with a tiling window manager for local development?

If so, what are the advantages? I know automating sessions is one of them, as explained in the article.

I am more interested in hearing about interactions with the terminal. You already get good mouse-less window management with something like i3 or xmonad.

How about copy & paste? I use urxvt plugin for this, but I often find myself using the mouse to select and middle-click. Is tmux better?

I recommend the book: Tmux--Productive Mouse-Free Developmenet, written by Brian P. Hogan. It's a concise and practical book about Tmux. There are some usable configuration in it, and you can learn something about concepts like session, window, pane in the book. After you combine vim style with tmux, it's quite perfect to do anything in the terminal. Haha, enjoy!

This is actually why I prefer Emacs. I can literally do all my development work in Emacs, with a full-featured shell (e-shell), directory explorer (dir-ed), REPL and full IDE for Clojure (CIDER). It's pretty great.

When I was first introduced to tmux, I was really excited by having a terminal session I could reattach to. I was never able to get very deep into it though: (1) a lot of the time a single script would get me up to speed, (2) the extra layer of abstraction broke some stuff I was doing, and (3) I couldn't make heads or tails of a lot of the tmux documentation. I'll definitely take a second look at a lot of the things people are posting here, but in the meantime, is there somewhere I can actually learn how to use tmux properly?

One of the first things I had to with tmux is figure out a convenient prefix key. I found the default prefix key (C-b) to be a little clumsy to use. After a little experimentation, C-j has become my secondary tmux prefix key of choice.

It doesn't interfere with my shell or Vim usage. C-j is redundant in shell as well as Vim because it does what pressing the Enter key would do. Further, in Vim, C-j is synonymous to j in normal and visual modes. C-j is also very easy to type because my right forefinger always returns to j while resting.

This is what my ~/.tmux.conf looks like.

  # Set C-j as secondary prefix key.
  # C-b remains intact as primary prefix key.
  set -g prefix2 C-j
  bind-key C-j send-prefix -2

  # Eliminate delay after <Esc> key press in Vim.
  set -g escape-time 0

  # Let Vim use 256 colors.
  set -g default-terminal screen-256color

I've been using tmux heavily in my local development workflow for the last 6 months or so, and it absolutely pays off to have three window tiles in a single terminal window at a bare minimum. I am also using teamocil to manage windows and panes in tmux, although it's not needed at all: https://github.com/remiprev/teamocil

When I set up initially on OSX, the conf took me a few to get right so that I have some mousing abilities and reasonable vim support. Here is a copy of my (simple) tmux.conf file: https://gist.github.com/mcescalante/004e649d8484574ce9d296ad...

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" David J. Wheeler

Tmux/Screen provides an extra redirectable abstraction layer over the terminal device.

The biggest complaint I regularly see about it is that people are used to the screen keybindings. I wonder why not add an abstraction layer there, where keypresses really call commands that perform the actions, and you could reconfigure these.

This is how Emacs has done it for 30 years...

    tmux set-option prefix C-a

    https://github.com/tmux/tmux/commit/2a1bb9#diff-fefa423d67264099ae82d4d2f5422b09

  set -g prefix C-a
  unbind C-b
  bind C-a send-prefix

I use Tmux resurrect[1] with Tmux continuum[2] so that after rebooting my laptop, my tmux session is restored.

[1]: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect [2]: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-continuum

iTerm2 has integration with tmux. Much better than the default Terminal shipped with macOS.

The one issue I have with tmux, versus using iterm natively, is that every single time I have to reboot my machine for an operating system upgrade, I lose all the terminal history of my tmux sessions - whereas with iterm, when the machine restarts, it restarts with the all the windows and terminal histories intact.

Its ironic that tmux doesn't provide any mechanism to save your terminal history between reboots. Tools like tmuxinator/tmux-resurrect will save your session/window/pane configs, but you lose all your history...

If I could just recover my (typically very valuable) terminal history between reboots, tmux would be the perfect tool for managing my terminal environments...

screen master race reporting it!

that said, i do mix screen on the local machine and tmux on the remote machine. lazy, but does the trick. of course one can script either to do everything one needs.

As an unsophisticated screen user without any interest in what seems to be a turf war, what is the deal with the never ending stream of "Use tmux!" articles on here?

I came from screen when I started using tmux. I spend quite some time to make the key bindings similar to screen, however, kept some things the tmux way because it was better. For people interested, this is my complete tmux.conf:

https://github.com/gitaarik/tmuxconf/blob/master/.tmux.conf

I do a lot of work in ssh shells, and somehow years ago I got out of the habit of using screen or tmux. I just took 20 minutes to go through the tutorial linked in this article.

With a pane open as a shell and another pane opened with emacs+intero almost immediately it felt better than using different ssh shells, which is what I usually do. The control-b prefix character use never interfered with any of my activities.

I've been a GNU Screen user for a good while. The increased productivity is wonderful.

However, I'm prevented from switching to Tmux because you can't attach to the same session from multiple terminals, and show a different window in each terminal.

I use this all the time in Screen - in Tmux, changing the window being viewed in one terminal, changes all other terminals attached to that session.

I dropped tmux for neovim terminal emulator with neovim-remote to hook into my existing nvim session. So far so go!

I started writing a terminal multiplexer in Rust, partially because I wanted to fix clearing ANSI escape codes to EOL, but also because I wanted to try and come up with a multiplexer that had very similar shortcuts and commands to Vim.

Won't be able to answer all your questions but to enable your mouse scroll add the following to your .tmux.conf

    set -g mouse on

Likewise, to select from mouse you probably need to press "Shift" in Linux or "Fn" in Mac.

I've had more issues with Mac than in Linux with tmux tbh.

I guess bad defaults have been chosen to maintain stability for previous users. IMHO, man pages should contain a .tmux.conf that demonstrate the "best" usage(s) of the tool.

IMHO man is the most important command in unix and "man man" the first step in learning unix.

That's just how (most) command line tools are. You have to invest some time to configure them. And hopefully you're not the type who will fiddle with the settings too much once you have stuff working. I use GNU stow to install my ZSH, tmux, vim, etc. settings on new computers and it works well for me.

I was able to work out pasting into tmux from the system buffer, but no solutions I've seen for copying out of tmux have ever worked for me. So yes, that's a pretty basic usability issue.

or at least provide a skeleton config with commented out and thoroughly explained options like this one http://download.redis.io/redis-stable/redis.conf

There's no reason to insult the project just because the default settings don't behave exactly how you want them to.

I personally like the default mouse setting, but you're completely free to change it if you don't. People have different preferences, that's why there are configuration settings to change things.

I use screen (like tmux) and xmonad.

The tiling window-manager is used for longer running GUI apps - webbrowser, pdf/email viewer, CAD etc and for apps that I don't context switch as quickly. Also for handling the dual monitor setup.

I use screen for managing a consistent cli environment - that could be anywhere - on my dev machine, or sshd to a dev container or cloud box. I also tend to context switch screen environments much more quickly - eg. between edit (vim), compile and run turnaround.

Similar to that, I've seen a lot of blog posts about Tmux and Vim, but I've been itching to see one where they talk about day-to-day. When do they use vim-split versus tmux pane, vim buffers versus tmux windows? I use both, but aren't very systematic...there's a bit of cognitive load when remembering which I'm using and using the different commands to navigate. You can't do diffs with panes and it's nice to use vim buffers instead of tmux windows when editing a series of files.

I imagine using a tiling window manager with tmux you'd have a similar issue. Sshing into a box you can launch tmux and have windows and splits inside, but you couldn't use your WM.

I used to use i3 and tmux for a time.

Advantage (of using tmux on top of i3):

When you spin up a new window with i3, it doesn't retain the previous's current working directory. There are some hacks to make it kind of work, none of which work nicely. With tmux it just works.

tmux has synchronized panes. It allows you to send same keystrokes to multiple terminals at once. This is useful for managing multiple host machines at once, i.e. ssh'ing into different machines at checking certain logs.

Disadvantages:

Double the amount of keybindings you need: one set for i3, one set for tmux. i3 allows you to active a mode where keystrokes are 'forwarded', so theoretically you can use the same keybindings for both, although it is very annoying if you forget to active this mode since you're now creating i3 windows instead of tmux panes and have to clean them up.

I'm writing an i3/tmux integration similar to iTerm2's[0], but working at the WM layer, using i3 and urxvt.

The reason I'm doing this is that I'm often ssh'd into a box, and having to ssh into multiple terminal is a chore. I often create a spontaneous term that I close after a couple of minutes. Being able to have a dedicated ssh'd workspace where every split is ssh'd into the box would be a godsent.

This would also fix the mouse integration and various other things that annoy me with raw tmux.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGhfE9n1RLo

Since I can't use a tiling window manager everywhere, I do the next best thing: I have a set of key configs for most platforms that gives me (mostly) uniform control over windows, and then use the local terminal emulator with tmux inside.

I use Moom on the Mac with hotkeys that match the Windows left/right-side tiling, and a custom OpenBox config[1] that matches those too:

https://github.com/rcarmo/docker-templates/blob/master/deskt...

Then on the Mac I usually use the native Terminal (I keep trying to switch to iTerm, but most of the performance issues Terminal had have been ironed out by now), on Linux I usually use lxterminal, and on Windows I either use Cygwin's mintty or (more recently) wsltty to interact with Bash for Windows:

https://github.com/mintty/wsltty

(even though I'm a Microsoft employee, I strongly dislike the "feel" of the standard console and the way it handles both fonts and copy/paste, so I seldom use it at all)

I also tried various hacks to do raise on hover and suchlike, but I found that some things were best left "native" and get along OK with these bare mouseless window management hotkeys.

Incidentally, tmux has a growing following among my colleagues (there are a lot of Microsoft folk getting to grips with Bash and SSH these days, so when I tried to pass on some best practices, tmux was right at the top of the list)

How do you deal with switching between projects though? I find my self switching between several projects as I'm working through something and suddenly something needs to be done in another project which is blocking someone. Wouldn't tmux + tmuxp (or similar) be more useful than just i3? Or do you have scripts for launching all those windows and putting them in the right place?

I run i3 and tmux. The biggest reason I do this is that I'm much more used to tmux key bindings rather than i3. Moreover, I don't think I'd get any huge benefits by getting more used to i3 key bindings.

Edit for another reason: I use Tmux on my work laptop (OSX) and on my Desktop (FreeBSD + i3), so my key bindings are supported on essentially whatever machine I'm on.

I use a tiling window manager, and mainly use tmux to maintain ssh connections to other servers that I can connect to remotely.

So my main "jumphost" machine has a tmux session with multiple "tabs" logged in to other systems I manage. I can connect to this tmux session from my work desktop machine, from my laptop, or from home (via VPN). Makes it very easy to stop, go somewhere else, and pick up with everything the way I left it. I also don't worry about dropped remote ssh connections anymore (not uncommon at home because I often have to reset my cheap wireless router).

I don't do anything really advanced with tmux. One thing I'd like to know is a good way to deal with tmux within tmux, I have occasionally stumbled into that situation and then it's hard to get the "inner" tmux to do anything because the "outer" tmux intercepts all the key commands.

I do. Part of it is just that I'm so used to it from using it remotely that I feel at home using it locally as well. But it's also very portable. For instance, I can use it in macOS or even on Windows using the Ubuntu bash subsystem. This makes it effectively a universal tiled window manager for me.

I use awesome wm with tmux and urxvt. Tmux has a nice copy mode, which has emacs and vi modes. By default it copies to tmux buffers, but you can set it up to copy to the system's clipboard:

https://coderwall.com/p/4b0d0a/how-to-copy-and-paste-with-tm...

It's rather idiosyncratic but I've gotten used to running all my terminals inside a single tmux window. I spend 95% of my time in either a terminal or Chrome so I basically only use awesome to switch between them, or put a browser and terminal side by side.

I use screen rather than tmux but the principal is the same.

I have set things up so that I maintain separate screen sessions per context, including separate shell histories (the single biggest win, by far), separate shell defaults, aliases, etc.

I was a long time tmux user while on mac. Since I've swapped to arch and i3 I don't use tmux at all, and just use the WM. I basically live in terminals nowadays and I've not really missed tmux. The thing I really do miss is vim-tmux-navigator.

https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator.

I use it with Xmonad, for me tmux's scripting and ability to detach and attach to sessions is a big win. It also allows me to run async tests by triggering a test from vim without blocking. And, the copy paste support is also very good.

I do that, not in a real "tiling window manager" but something very close: openbox, set to show no titlebars, and using shortcuts to title the windows to precise positions. I have 3 position: most of my screen on the left, a small vertical slice on the right, a smaller chunk underneath. If I want a titlebar for some application, I have a shortcut that will give the window a titlebar, and then I can move it around with the mouse if I want to. So I get the best of both worlds.

Surprise - I don't run tmux. It is simpler to have several roxterm, in these position, with various tabs open. When I work remotely, I use screen on the remote host, but that's all.

To give you an idea of my shortcuts, in a real life scenario ; my caps lock is remapped to control or escape with xcape:

- esc: pop a new roxterm and from wherever I am, bring me to the terminal desktop

- f9: resize this roxterm to the left part of the screen

- esc: pop another roxterm, focus it

- ctrl-f9: resize it to the right vertical slice of the screen

- f4: switch to the browser desktop

- f12: put by browser in full screen, to check some reference without distraction

- f5: switch back to the terminals desktop

- alt-tab: switch to the roxterm that's currently on the right

- f12: make this roxterm full screen to do something without distraction for a while

- f12: demaximize and put back this roxterm where it was

- f9: now move this roxterm to the left, over the other one

- alt-tab: move to the other roxterm that was on the left

- ctrl-f9: put this roxterm in the vertical slice position on the right

- ctrl-space: make this roxterm sticky, showing on all desktop

- f4: move back to the internet desktop to check more documentation

- f9: resize the browser to be on the left part of the screen, so that I can see both the browser and the roxterm

- f5: move back to the terminal desktop. The space occupied by the browser will be replaced by the roxterm I left there, on the left

- alt-tab: move focus to this roxterm

- ctrl-t: open a new tab in this roxterm

- ctrl-v : paste some stuff from the internet browser

(etc..)

I have accomplished all that with about 20 keystrokes, from muscle memory. When I connect my extra wide screen, f10 and f11 have similar windows resizing function as f9 do on the laptop screen. f1 to f8 take me to desktop dedicated to some use or another (f7 is the windows desktop, with visual studio, f6 is the rstudio desktop, etc)

One think I positively hated until recently: copy and paste. Muscle memory means ctrl-shift-c in one application and ctrl-c in another didn't work. So in the terminal, I remapped the sigint signals to ctrl-x with stty. Hitting ctrl-x is just as convenient as ctrl-c and now I can copy paste as needed. ctrl-v to enter verbatim sequences is done with ctrl-q, just like in vim. so ctrl-c and ctrl-v work everywhere.

When I catch myself wanting to use the x copy paste buffer, the middle click is not so hard: on a thinkpad keyboard, it is right below the space key. But I just prefer ctrl-v. The luxury of having 2 independant copy-paste buffers is appreciable for some tasks however :)

Anyway, sorry for the long reply. I just don't have a lot of opportunities to talk about my setup. I am some kind of an optimization freak, I know it. But I don't want an interface to bother me. I have been using that for the last 3 or 4 years after giving up on OSX, and it has one great quality: I don't have to think about it. It just work the way I want. YMMV of course.

I use awesome wm, tmux and vim. awesome gets the job done. I don't see differences enough in the others to make me go through the trouble of switching. I'm not super fond of the default keybindings but I know the ones I need - easy to re-bind but not worth it.

I use mostly the stock awesomewm taskbar/dock setup. I tried doing custom stuff there and it was doable ... but the "reload my wm and see if it fails to start even though syntax check passed" got old, and I gave up.

I'll usually have my desktop split two thirds terminal, with the remaining third split between browser[1] and slack. (Or all terminal, with the other stuff on additional monitor(s)). I don't usually have enough windows open to use more than one 'tag' or desktop, but when I find myself wandering afield in my browsing, I tends to shunt offtopic stuff off to another tag.

I use two tmux sessions , with one showing at any one time. I run them in Konsole - out of all the terminal emulators I've found, that's the one that can handle massive scroll rates without lagging.

The first tmux session is named 'pairing' and is where I do my day-to-day work. Anyone on my team who sshs in will auto-connect to that session. For a while I had it prompting me for approval via an awesome popup but that broke with the ugprade to more recent versions and wasn't useful enough to fix. I now just have a notification that displays on connect/disconnect.

Within each session, I have topical windows - usually per-project. A single vim and one or more shell panes. I have set up (neo)vim so that any time I "vi" in any pane of a tmux window, it opens in that window's vi session. A given window may have quite a number of shell panes depending on the environment. And for some testing cases, tmux's "synchronize-window" is invaluable.

In vim, I prefer splits to tabs and end up using lots of both. I'm slowly learning to get comfortable with buffers and will see how that changes things.

In the second named session ('private') I manage mail (mutt, but experimenting with more CLI-driven options like nmh), twitter (rainbowstream), irssi (via nested tmux on a cheap vps) and my project/notes/todo manager - which is another three-pane vim split, with shell functions that let me send stuff over there/read from there from anywhere.

I rely heavily on small helper scripts and lately a growing number of custom macros on my keyboard.

Some of the things I've read in the comments here have given me plenty more stuff to explore :)

Heh. Now that I write it up, I see that it's apparently really complex - but it's evolved over time and suits my work really well. I'm still ironing out the info/todo management tooling but it looks promising.

[1] If browsing text wasn't a horrible experience I'd do all of that in the shell too.

Edit: If folks are remotely interested, I can write up a blog post and publish some of my hacks.

When I set up a new server, I always configure ~/.bash_profile as follows:

   if [ $TERM = "xterm" ]; then
     ( (tmux has-session -t remote && \
        tmux attach-session -t remote) || \
       (tmux new-session -s remote) ) && exit 0
     echo "tmux failed to start"
   fi
   if [ $TERM = "screen" ]; then
     clear
     cat /etc/motd
   fi

This way tmux gets executed serverside always when I login remotely (e.g. via PuTTY), so my logon session and all running programs are always protected against sudden connectivity breaks. Also I rebind Ctrl+B to Ctrl+A via ~/.tmux.conf.

Three keyboard combinations to remember for beginner: Ctrl+A C creates a new window, Ctrl+A D detaches, and Ctrl+A {digit} switches windows. I'm not a power user of tmux, just a few basic features is all I need, but they have changed my server administration habits dramatically.

Half a dozen commands will get you 90% of the way there. After you've run tmux:

  ctrl+b followed by...
  % - split pane vertically
  " - split pane horizontally
  arrow keys - change pane you're typing in
  :new-window
  2 - switch to window 2
  x - kill pane
  d - detach

Command line arguments:

  tmux list-sessions
  tmux attach #will attach to last session by default
  tmux attach -t0 #will attach to session 0

I've found that adding a simple configuration makes tmux a) nicer to look at b) somewhat more intuitive (the default colors made the screen confusing to me.)

This is my current configuration: https://gist.github.com/dguaraglia/f15f39f339545041845612a5b...

With that and using tmuxp to manage a context for each of my projects, I can quickly "launch" a project and have a window with an editing pane, a pane to run tests and a pane to run deployment commands/anything else, all of the panes are already using the correct Python virtualenv, etc.

This is a pretty comprehensive cheatsheet: https://gist.github.com/MohamedAlaa/2961058

I think you should give the man page & built in documentation another chance. It's not that long (maybe 40-50 pages printed) and you can skip a few sections that you'll know to look up if you need them. You can also skip the detailed descriptions of most commands and options. Just having the important shortcuts memorized and having a general idea of what commands you have and what they do is all you need. Don't forget to read the examples.