tmux

chtekk b10g

Sunday, October 5. 2008

Posted by Luca Longinotti in Gentoo, Longi's life

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I'm finally back on the net, after not having any internet access at my new apartment in Zürich after I moved there.
I now started my bachelor studies at the ETH Zürich, of course in Computer Science, though there's a little bit too much maths right now for me to be really excited about it, future semesters will be better I hope.
So I'll try to get back to a few Gentoo things in the near future, now that I also finally fixed up my main dev system (which had its disk die just before I moved)...
Still this blog entry's main focus is to tell you the name of a package I discovered today:

app-misc/tmux

After reinstalling this system I, as always before, emerged screen to take care of my detached terminal needs, I always had the problem with backspace not working correctly from the desktop, which I was never able to fix correctly, but it was bearable. This time it seems something else went wrong too, and inside my screen sessions it didn't source .bashrc or .bash_profile (which sources .bashrc), even if the shell was correctly set to a bash login shell...
So, while perusing Gentoo Wiki's Screen TIPs to see if anyone had seen something like this, at the end of that page I came across the mention of tmux, a "simple, modern, BSD-licensed alternative to GNU Screen".
Seeing that it only depended on ncurses (which is usually installed everywhere), and was only like 100kb of source, I installed it and tried it out. I have to say I'm impressed, this little tool does everything I did with screen too (mainly just having multiple, detached terminals and resuming them, which is probably no "advanced screen usage", but what most people will likely need), backspace works without any fiddling, the Bash stuff is correctly sourced, and the few commands are easy to adapt to, here a little overview:

tmux

Starts a new tmux session

CTRL-b d

Press CTRL-b, then d, to detach the terminal

tmux a

Reattach to the detached terminal

Still, read man tmux to get the full overview, and then happily do emerge -C screen, as I did.

Best regards, chtekk.

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Thank you! I've been staying away from screen except when I knew I needed to be able to continue work from elsewhere, because its key bindings were always at least a little wrong. tmux looks perfect!

#1 Peter Abrahamsen (Homepage) on 2008-12-01 20:56 (Reply)

That's nice to hear, but it's also interesting to know that good old app-misc/screen is seeing more active development in the last few months. The mailing list is much more lively and there is talk of all kinds of enhancements as well as evidence of a lot of clean-ups of the code.

#2 Jeroen Roovers (Homepage) on 2008-12-15 13:45 (Reply)

I've been using screen since it's already installed on most of the machines I deal with, but it works a lot better when invoked as "screen -e '^Bb'" to change the escape key. (I have this set in my .screenrc too, but of course that's only on one machine.)

#3 Jim Norris on 2009-02-21 00:07 (Reply)

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