Another easy to use option is using byobu (https://github.com/dustinkirkland/byobu).
Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
131–140 of 285 posts
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#132I gave up on it once I discovered https://zellij.dev/ Just even for how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse for copy pasting.
I tried tmux so many times, could not commit the sequences to memory, but then zellij was just out of the gate, easy to "discover," and then I started writing plugins (rust wasm), and I even submitted a PR which got accepted to support background colors in panes/tabs.
I am a monthly donor, I think it has the right balance of community plus the lead dev has a vision, opinionated but open to inputs, and focused.
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#133I used tmux for quite some time, and just stopped using it one day. I realized that whatever tmux brings can be done better by a good terminal. I also hated dealing with all the wrong colors, escape character support, missing chars and messed up terminal buffers
Most modern terminals have a built-in multiplexing anyway. When you use tmux, you're essentially using a terminal emulator on top of a terminal emulator.
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#134I gave up on it once I discovered https://zellij.dev/ Just even for how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse for copy pasting.
This sentiment seems to be shared widely. Is there a good conversion guide for tmux users? I tried zellij a couple of years ago when it first got popular and it didn't click for me.
https://zellij.dev/screencasts/
has some starting links, if screencasts do it for you
For me the only glitch was some key binding collision with ghostty/aerospace but it works perfectly out of the box on alacritty for me
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#135I gave up on it once I discovered https://zellij.dev/ Just even for how tab and panes are setup, and how it's good for scrolling and text selection with your mouse for copy pasting.
I did the same, however, I recently switched back because zellij has just gotten too annoyingly bloated. I ended up on tmuxp to build my tmux session and autossh to keep me connected to my various ssh sessions and am much happier.
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#136I'm constantly fighting with tmux copying. I want it to perform like native copying, but in mouse mode it seems to copy more characters than I want, copy newlines when I don't want them, and doesn't copy to clipboard in tmux-in-tmux situations.
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#137> Less awkward prefix keys
> Probably the most common change among tmux users is to change the prefix from the rather awkward C-b to something that’s a little more accessible.
I like the awkwardness of the default prefix key. I have almost never activated it by accident.
> Intuitive Split Commands
> Another thing I personally find quite difficult to remember is the pane splitting commands." to split vertically and % to split horizontally just doesn’t work for my brain.
This is super intuitive to me. two ' in parallel means splitting horizontally. two ° split by an almost horizontal line means splitting vertically.
> Easy Config Reloads
I reloaded config over a few hundreds of times in my first week learning tmux a decade ago. I only reloaded config once in the last 5 years if I recall correctly. It's not something you should memorize.
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#138Could never get mouse copy to work well (using mac at moment). When I make text selection, selects yellow and upon release goes to terminal prompt. I had one config work at one point and it kept selecting from all panes, not just one the one I'm in. Any ideas?
This is also why i gave up on it. Don't want to install iTerm either, more blaot.
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#139I love tmux! It's perfectly usable! You only need a 400-line custom-built configuration file[1]!
[1] https://doc.xn0.org/.tmux.conf
Disclaimer: I am being silly but serious. tmux is absolutely not user-friendly out of the box. It is, however, extremely nice after an absurd amount of tweaking, which is either an endorsement or a damning, depending on your perspective.
Re: Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't speak for the parent, but I rarely login to the same remote server twice and don't want to need to set things up and clean them up anytime I do. This is why I try to keep my stuff as close to vanilla as possible. If anything goes wrong on a server and someone sees I have a whole bunch of dot files to customize my config, it becomes a red herring that I have to spend time explaining away.
If only we had ways to automate repeating processes… oh well
No, wanting to keep things vanilla when you're dealing with lots of random servers is a valid concern. Just because you can solve this with shell scripting doesn't mean you should.