Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

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.

Well, the nice thing here is that with the integration between vim-test and vim-dispatch is that you don't have to do anything for having the tests run in a separate session. It just works. I mean really you _are_ just having it run in a separate session, just more smoothly.

If the tests pass then the tmux window the tests were run in will just disappear, if not, you get popped back to the quickfix window with the errors listed.

Give it a go and see how you like it! :)

But (a) screen still exists right?, (b) byobu, (c) tmux allows one to remap the keys however one likes.

If you use ViM, vim-obsession[1] work with tmux-ressurect[2] to restore vim -S

[1]: https://github.com/tpope/vim-obsession [2]: https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect/blob/master/d...

How do you get into VI copy mode?