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Using tmux properly

danielallendeutsch.com

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Re: Using tmux properly

#111

Post by 0xCMP »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #33

Yesterday I was helping a friend setting a box with no graphical session: I fired up tmux in the linux virtual terminal and then proceeded to realize without my tmux.conf I couldn't do a thing because I have always been using entirely different keybindings from the default. This is the problem with too much customization. Learning to use the default configuration may be difficult but it's probably worth the effort, f…

I have personally been running in to the problem of TOO many different ways to do the same thing. I am using many tools that all do a certain part better and each one of them share certain features which are accessed in all different ways (or it does something slightly different).

i.e. Atom, Emacs, Neovim, and PyCharm. I try to stick to one, but switch around to get the best of each of them. It's been driving me crazy lately thought.

Re: Using tmux properly

#112

Post by wyclif »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #100
save_ferris wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the frequency of such a situation, it can really bite you when something big breaks and you need to ssh into a vanilla server in the middle of the night under pressure. Trying to fix a production fire under the gaze of an angry CEO is stressful enough, but not being able to take care of business on a box because of a missing personal config is truly one of the worst experiences I've ever had in this bus…

Keep your dot files in github. Grab them. No internet, I bet you have them on your laptop that you are ssh'd to the server from. SCP them over. Heck, cut and paste them if needed. If things are so bad nether of these work you have bigger issues and need to consider a design with some redundancy. Clos fabrics and VM/containers and if you have to have bare metal then you should have more then one (cluster or behind a S…

Yep, I don't understand why people think you can't clone your dotfiles and copy over your ~/.tmux.conf to your home directory on the server. It's the first thing I do when I get an account set up, along with the ~/.zshrc and ~/.vimrc, and I have it all automated as a script. Makes everything easy.

Re: Using tmux properly

#113

Post by nighthawk454 »

znpy wrote: post #46
rnhmjoj wrote: post #33

Yesterday I was helping a friend setting a box with no graphical session: I fired up tmux in the linux virtual terminal and then proceeded to realize without my tmux.conf I couldn't do a thing because I have always been using entirely different keybindings from the default. This is the problem with too much customization. Learning to use the default configuration may be difficult but it's probably worth the effort, f…

I 120% agree. I once lost my emacs dotfile and suddenly i was almost unable to use Emacs on my own pc. Since then, i've decided to apply as little customisation as possible to software I use, and read the documentation and learn the standard configuration instead. For some reasons nowadays it's trendy to add colors, bells and whistles to things but I've found out that learning the standard/default configuration lets…

Totally agree. I think a lot of the replies miss the point - that having non-standard configuration is inherently more complex, because it adds a layer of abstraction. It is simpler to not have this layer.

Related note, check out fish shell [1], whose design document has an interesting argument against configurability in software.

  [1] http://fishshell.com/docs/current/design.html

Re: Using tmux properly

#114

Post by heywire »

wyclif wrote: post #112
myrandomcomment wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep your dot files in github. Grab them. No internet, I bet you have them on your laptop that you are ssh'd to the server from. SCP them over. Heck, cut and paste them if needed. If things are so bad nether of these work you have bigger issues and need to consider a design with some redundancy. Clos fabrics and VM/containers and if you have to have bare metal then you should have more then one (cluster or behind a S…

Yep, I don't understand why people think you can't clone your dotfiles and copy over your ~/.tmux.conf to your home directory on the server. It's the first thing I do when I get an account set up, along with the ~/.zshrc and ~/.vimrc, and I have it all automated as a script. Makes everything easy.

I'm willing to bet many employers really don't like their employees putting personal config files on a production server...

Re: Using tmux properly

#115

Post by myrandomcomment »

heywire wrote: post #114
wyclif wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I don't understand why people think you can't clone your dotfiles and copy over your ~/.tmux.conf to your home directory on the server. It's the first thing I do when I get an account set up, along with the ~/.zshrc and ~/.vimrc, and I have it all automated as a script. Makes everything easy.

I'm willing to bet many employers really don't like their employees putting personal config files on a production server...

Source is a great command as are flags that point at which configuration to use when you start something. So...

Re: Using tmux properly

#116

Post by Lxr »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #100
save_ferris wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the frequency of such a situation, it can really bite you when something big breaks and you need to ssh into a vanilla server in the middle of the night under pressure. Trying to fix a production fire under the gaze of an angry CEO is stressful enough, but not being able to take care of business on a box because of a missing personal config is truly one of the worst experiences I've ever had in this bus…

Keep your dot files in github. Grab them. No internet, I bet you have them on your laptop that you are ssh'd to the server from. SCP them over. Heck, cut and paste them if needed. If things are so bad nether of these work you have bigger issues and need to consider a design with some redundancy. Clos fabrics and VM/containers and if you have to have bare metal then you should have more then one (cluster or behind a S…

This works fine if your configuration contains nothing too custom. Typically after copying my dotfiles I have to edit them quite substantially to make them actually work - mainly because they rely on outside sources (in .tmux.conf, stuff like `set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l bash"`, in .vimrc it's usually colours, clipboard hacks etc that break). Maybe I should have a second, trimmed down version with no outside dependencies.

Re: Using tmux properly

#117

Post by hyperhopper »

bostand wrote: post #63
rocqua wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally would, because learning less tools is great. I've had some problem applying this principle when using tmux locally on a system with i3. You kinda need to be consistent in which of the 2 you use to create new shell windows.

Funny you mention that. I tried i3 last year but quickly realized I already have the good parts in tmux. I am now trying to simplify my workflow by only using tmux and emacs. It's minimal and works on almost any system I log into.

Isn't the emacs philosophy to never leave emacs? Doesn't using tmux go against that? Or do you run tmux inside of emacs?

I use spacemacs and coming from vim, its taking some getting used to but I'm still always trying to do more things in emacs and not switch to my terminal workspace.

Re: Using tmux properly

#118

Post by trengrj »

I'd argue that using a terminal multiplexer like tmux or screen on a production server (as this article implied) often means you are doing things wrong.

It is better to set up a service (systemd or other) and configure it to start correctly rather than relying on a tmux session to manage long running processes. By going this route you get logging, auto restarting, starting on boot, monitoring etc for free.

Re: Using tmux properly

#120

Post by xenophonf »

jabl wrote: post #64
mmagin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I learned screen defaults, so ^A is far too strong of a habit to change.

I use screen, and in my book the choice of ^A for the default escape is a giant WTF, and remapping that is the first thing I do on a new account before starting to use screen (I use ^o, for no particular reason I suppose except it's not used by anything else I use). Don't the screen developers ever need to go to the beginning of a line in the shell or editor?

A friend suggested remapping the Screen command key to ` (backquote), and it changed my life. Maybe it's because I grew up using Esc key combos a lot (terminals with broken/missing meta keys), but it feels natural to treat it like another modifier key there on the left edge of the keyboard.
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