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Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

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Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#131
post #49

I'd love to try this, but most of the places that I would want to use it are servers, and the rust requirements are way beyond where debian-stable lives. Too much hassle to muck with backports and package pinning for a QoL tool - my feedback would be to try to make this install without tomfoolery on the stable branch of major distros.

For most of the rust tools I tried—not this one though—they provided precompiled static binaries that is so easy to deploy to any systems, including ancient distros (like RHEL 7).

So it is easy to solve this problem—just provide pre-compiled binaries on GitHub Releases. I believe the rust ecosystem made this relatively easy.

Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#132
post #104

Looks nice. One feature I'd like is a read-only mode. Sometimes I want to execute a long running process and be able to just watch it run without risking that I hit Ctrl C by accident. I was surprised to find that Screen doesn't support this, I guess probably tmux does. tail is fine but I don't always want to record a huge log file.

| /dev/null ?

I guess they mean they want to be able to look at latest stdout/err without having to write it to a file, but not discarding it all

Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's a good point, "lightweight" was probably not the best term. I meant lightweight in terms of the cognitive overhead of picking up a new tool, not really in terms of performance. I would expect that shpool will perform better on some workloads and tmux will perform better on others (though in both cases they are probably good enough). The main difference is that tmux is a power user tool that you generally…

Does this mean you don't plan on taking any ideas from screen/tmux and implementing them in your tool?

Well potentially some, but definitely not tiling and screen splitting.

Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#135
"The main way that shpool differs from tmux is that tmux is a terminal multiplexer which necessarily means that it offers session persistence features, while shpool only aims to be a session persistence tool. In contrast to tmux the philosophy of shpool is that managing different terminals is the job of your display or window manager, not your session persistence tool."

What if the computer user does not use a window manager. Many years ago I stopped using X11 and started using textmode only. Then tmux was released and appeared in NetBSD packages collection, it soon went into NetBSD base and I have been using it with almost zero problems ever since. If I am forced to run a graphics layer so that I can run a window manager so that I can run shpool, then is this solution truly "lightweight". The shpool program might be lightweight but the system I would need to run it would be heavyweight, when compared with textmode, no graphics.

For me, an assessment of "lightweight" also needs to consider the compile-time requirements. For example, I use a static copy of GCC that weighs in at 242.3 MiB and I can obtain libevent and libtinfo, the only two third-party tmux dependencies, from any number of mirrors across the internet. I like that GCC does not try to connect to the internet by default, or otherwise. When I lose an internet connection, I use the time to compile programs. GCC, and probably most if not all C compilers, add no friction to doing that.

Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely don't need the in-memory terminal emulator to handle resizes or allow attaching with multiple local terminal emulators, since dtach does both and does not have an in-memory terminal emulator. > I'm actually confused about why they'd go to the effort of implementing a VT100 emulator, write the code to redraw the screen from it Well, we kinda cheated here. shpool_vt100 is just the already existing vt100…

Hi. Nice kit. > I couldn't use my normal `i3`/`sway` bindings to switch between terminals inside a tmux session Just curious, what are your normal 'i3'/'sway' bindings that you cannot get to work with tmux ? And what actual terminal program do you use ? Perhaps tmux wants more config than most people care to bother with, but scrollback and copy-paste can be configured just as you like.

If you’re using a tiling window manager your window switch keybindings necessarily conflict between the manager and tmux, since if you configure the same one and then press it while focused on a tmux window, the tiling window manager will override tmux and claim the event.

Scrollback and copy paste cannot always be configured as you want. I’ve shared some specifics elsewhere in this thread.

Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely not a complete alternative, but a surprising number of tmux users are only in it for the session persistence. We did a little internal (criminally underpowered and confounded) survey of some tmux users at google and found that half of them were only really using it for session persistence. I was really surprised by this and thought more people would be using all the slick tiling features that tmux has…

I think there is a whole group of vim + tmux people out there and their primary use case may not be session persistence, but to construct an IDE like environment, which is also my use case.

Yeah I was expecting a lot of that, which is why I found that survey data so surprising.

Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know mobile shell (mosh)? [1] Seems like most of the features you need are what mosh offers. I've been using it for a decade, probably, and it is pretty awesome for latent mobile connections (read as: throttled 2G @16kBit/s with interruptions). https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh

I think mosh first appeared in 2012? How can you have been using it for decades?

Sorry, mobile typo. Been using it since around 2013.

Re: Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative

#140
post #81
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "debian" folder, I suspect it's trivial to build a Deb and manually install? Seems to have pretty modest install dependencies? https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool/blob/master/debian/cont...

I had to do this: git clone https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool.git cd shpool sudo apt install libpam0g-dev # you may need to install build-essential and other packages too as the # build-depends field in debian/control is incomplete dpkg-buildpackage -b sudo apt install ../shpool_0.6.2_amd64.deb systemctl --user enable shpool systemctl --user start shpool

i had to `dpkg-buildpackage -b -d -us -uc`
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