Posted by speckx 5 hours ago
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 do that roughly every 60-90 seconds with tmux - so, until the zellij developers relent (they suggest the "proper way" of copy paste is to pipe the data into a text editor and use that - but has the downside of not supporting system copy-paste buffers.) - no options other than to stick with tmux (or fork zellij - but that seems a bit much....)
Zellij is close to 50 megabytes, but tmux and all dependent libraries (minus libc, it's always there) is about 2 megabytes.
I use tmux to reattach to programs after the network connection dies, and not really anything else. I would welcome a version of it that stripped out everything but that, and just replayed the last few pages of scrollback on reattach.
Like `dtach`?
Mac WM is horrible, I use aerospace to make it tolerable
Then, if you're like me and read this years ago, play around with the Light Mode dropdown which was new to me. :)
It's this year's April Fools' joke: https://xkcd.com/3227/ :P
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.
The only issues I've had with it is that sometimes it's hot keys conflict with vim, but you can easily turn it temporarily off with ctrl+ g.
If you're already used to tmux I'm not sure you would benefit much from changing, but it definitely has a better out of the box with pane hints, names, and more user friendly hot keys.
:term to open a terminal in a new vim window (or :vert term)
Standard window movements apply (by default the window prefix is Ctrl-W), most important are: Ctrl-W,{hjkl} to switch between windows, Ctrl-W,{<>+-} to resize windows, Ctrl-W,{HJKL} to move windows to edges, Ctrl-W,{qc} to (force) close windows
Enter normal mode of a terminal buffer with Ctrl-W,N: now you can perform vim motions and scroll the output
Enter insert mode with i and you can type into the terminal again
In insert mode: Ctrl-W "x to paste register x, Ctrl-W . to send a literal Ctrl-W. If too annoying, you can change the window prefix of vim
This goes for vim, neovim also has a terminal mode but it works differently I think
i want tmux for three things:
1. easy splits
2. easy scrollback
3. being able to restart a session if my terminal dies
given all that, tmux works exactly as expected.
what are all these "significantly better ui and overall ux"?
I know I'd get used to them, but the key combos used by tmux seem very odd choices, even to someone who used to code on a real glass tty!
For them, there's as much variety of desires as for any other window manager, and there are tons of those. But terminal ones are usually significantly easier to configure in wild ways due to having fewer (but more powerful) knobs to tweak, so a fair number choose just one and configure the heck out of it.
I tried zellij a couple of years ago when it first got popular and it didn't click for me.
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
Was quite impressed initially and invested weeks in building new muscle memory, but somehow Zellij crashed with panic more than once, leaving all my processes orphaned. Decided to go back to tmux, and found a simple fix for my Shift+Enter issue.
In case anyone is looking for it, the fix is "bind-key -T root S-Enter send-keys C-j" borrowed from https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6072.
I was looking, thank you!
I’ve been relying on the fact that in the worst-case scenario (if a pane hangs and tmux session becomes unresponsive) I can just kill tmux server and not have to hunt down and kill dozens of individual processes afterwards.
Terminal programs don’t see key events. It’s all text. I just checked st (suckless) code and the RETURN key will send “\r” aka carriage return. Control+j is “\n” or line feed.
Try `tmux -CC` in iTerm.
For a tmux novice like me, this was a total game changer :)
I actually don’t like control mode much though. It’s a terrible protocol. Absolutely abysmal design which leads to a plethora of edge case bugs.
At some point I’ll replace tmux control mode entirely but for the moment it solves the immediate problem.
bind-key -n M-n new-window
bind-key -n M-1 select-window -t :1
bind-key -n M-2 select-window -t :2
bind-key -n M-3 select-window -t :3
bind-key -n M-4 select-window -t :4
bind-key -n M-5 select-window -t :5
bind-key -n M-6 select-window -t :6
bind-key -n M-7 select-window -t :7
bind-key -n M-8 select-window -t :8
bind-key -n M-9 select-window -t :9
Also if you want a vi-like copy mode (where you can select and copy stuff) that opens using Alt-/:
bind-key -n M-/ copy-mode
set -g status-keys vi
set-window-option -g mode-keys vi
# v to trigger selection
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi v send-keys -X begin-selection
# wl-copy if you use wayland
# mouse selection in copy mode to copy
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi MouseDragEnd1Pane send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "wl-copy"
# y to copy
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi y send-keys -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "wl-copy"
You can also put the config into ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf
edit: And if you want a powerline-style design:
set -g pane-border-style "fg=colour252"
set -g pane-active-border-style "fg=colour25"
set -g status-style "bg=default,fg=default"
set -g status-left "#[fg=colour231,bg=colour25,bold] #S #[fg=colour25,bg=default,nobold]"
set -g status-right "#[fg=colour67,bg=default]#[fg=colour231,bg=colour67] %Y-%m-%d %H:%M #[fg=colour25,bg=colour67]#[fg=colour231,bg=colour25,bold] #h "
setw -g window-status-format "#[fg=colour243,bg=default] #I #W "
setw -g window-status-current-format "#[fg=colour28,bg=default,reverse]#[fg=colour231,bg=colour28,bold,noreverse] #I #W #[fg=colour28,bg=default,noreverse]"
I wish it had better defaults but now I run it as is. After a while you get used to it. The only thing I always have to change is the mouse scroll and my brain cannot retain the exact command.
I had a friend that even had his public keys added to the /root/.ssh/ but I didin't go that far -I didn't even put my own .emacs out - but I at least could use good tools to look at the tcpdump output or giant log files if needed. "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping" is not that big of a deal anymore.
And if people want to just use some default open source image, just point out that in modern cloud environments, you don't want each node to customize itself, you want to pre-run that process one time per node type in your "directed graph of image delta pipelines" which takes the input image and publishes the cloud ready app-specific images (with your DNS configs, LDAP integration, whatever, plus emacs/neovim and screen/tmux :)
For example, leave the existing prefix binding (ctrl-b), but also add something nicer for day-to-day use (ctrl-space or similar).
I had the same issue with gnu emacs… but at some point i lost my very custom configuration when the disk broke… i resorted to use a mostly-vanilla emacs :)
In any case it's not practical to carry your dotfiles everywhere you go. Changes are also a hassle to propagate
[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.
# Mindless copy and paste command:
#
# # Standard Linux / GNU tools
# wget -O ~/.tmux.conf https://andrew-quinn.me/tmux-conf.txt
# curl -fsSL https://andrew-quinn.me/tmux-conf.txt -o ~/.tmux.conf
# busybox wget -q -O ~/.tmux.conf https://andrew-quinn.me/tmux-conf.txt
# [... many, many others]https://github.com/jcs/dotfiles/blob/master/.tmux.conf
I’ve only reverted the prefix binding back.
[0] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/1935#issuecomm...
> 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.
I am 100% in agreement with you. It takes all of 5 seconds to add:
unbind-key -T prefix C-b
set-option -g prefix C-s
Seems like they are keeping up-to-date too: https://bookshop.org/p/books/tmux-3-productive-mouse-free-de...
That said, I'd push back on the idea that the default tmux config is just "ugly". The real usability issue is that the keybindings are so divorced from how people intuitively think about splits and windows that even experienced users can't remember them. The visual defaults are just a symptom of the deeper problem that it was designed for someone who already had a mental model built around screen.