Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment • Hacker News Board

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#151

Post by spinningarrow » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 4:26 PM UTC

susam wrote: post #127

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…

I ended up using C-s. Unfortunately C-j is taken over by vim-tmux-navigator (which I don't mind at all).

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#152

Post by Touche » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 4:29 PM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #91

Touche wrote: post #62

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 w…

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 don't think I'm insulting the project by saying I disagree with their defaults. Certainly no disrespect intended.

> 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.

Right, but defaults are important. You have to ask yourself why people are using the project. Are people using tmux for its mouse settings? I think people primarily using it for session management. If that's the case, why does it, by default, override my terminal's settings? That just seems like a violation of "do one thing" to me.

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#153

Post by igg » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #147

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…

tmux-resurrect seems to have an option to save bash history. When combined with tmux-continuum, it should happen seamlessly.

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#154

Post by mcescalante » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

joshuakarjala wrote: post #139

mcescalante wrote: post #23

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…

How do you get into VI copy mode?

Either (v) for visual and the arrow keys, or (V) to select entire current line, then (y) to yank. (yy) will also yank lines without entering visual mode, which I use a lot.

If you're asking how I copy in general from stdout with the cursor, I select the text (selection appears yellow) and press Enter and it copies to the clipboard :)

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#155

Post by blfr » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

mambodog wrote: post #107

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…

Use mosh[1] instead of ssh for superior handling of weaker connections and roaming. You close your laptop one place, go elsewhere, switch to LTE, whatever, open the lid and you're back on. Don't even need to reconnect.

[1] https://mosh.org/

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#156

Post by ghshephard » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 6:34 PM UTC

igg wrote: post #153

ghshephard wrote: post #147

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…

tmux-resurrect seems to have an option to save bash history. When combined with tmux-continuum, it should happen seamlessly.

The history I'm referring to is the scrollback buffer. The work that I do, which is predominantly interactive in a REPL like environment with remote devices, has a rich history of information in each window/pane. I dread losing those scrollback buffers every time I have to restart tmux.

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#157

Post by jyriand » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 8:26 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #120

jitl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tmux expects you to rebind its leader to Ctrl-a once you're ready to move off of screen. Otherwise, it's default works nicely if you are nesting screen inside of Tmux or vis-versa

I use Ctrl-a as the "go back to beginning of line" shortcut that Readline-capable programs offer by default [1]. That's actually one reason I never got used to Screen ;) [1] that is, using the Emacs keybindings it exposes by default. I know you can change that through .inputrc

I'm using Ctrl-a on tmux, and to get back to beginning on line I just have to press it twice Ctrl-a Ctrl-a.

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#158

Post by mkup » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 8:37 PM UTC

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #25

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…

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.

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#159

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 8:44 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #150

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 w…

[deleted]

Re: Benefits of using tmux – streamlining your development environment

#160

Post by cm3 » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #150

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 w…

I cannot use st because it still has corner cases that xterm works well but st doesn't yet, and I find the need to patch the sources hard to maintain when a new release comes out and has refactorings included.

But I must say that st's font rendering of Unicode is more complete than rxvt-unicode or xterm. With the same font configured in all three, st is the one that manages to render the most glyphs of plan9port's unicode sample file. Would be great to have the same in urxvt or xterm.