In the last few days my attention was unfairly distributed between a whole lot of tasks. The fragmentation and constant context switching affected my productivity, so I briefly revisited my toolbox setup, in hopes to find something that I didn’t know about, forgot about, or have greatly underutilized.
One of the things that came (again) on my radar was terminal multiplexer tmux. I’ve blogged about it before. I used it for a while, but at some point, it faded away from my daily routine. The two most useful features of tmux are:
- Persistent sessions, where you can work on a remote machine, detach your terminal, disconnect from the machine entirely, and then, at some point later, connect again and continue from where you left off. With simpler workloads and reliable Internet connection, this became less useful to me. When I do need this functionality, I use screen, which is more often installed on the machines that I work with.
- Terminal multiplexer, where you can split your terminal screen into a number of panels and work with each one like it’s a separate terminal. This is still useful, but can be done by a number of different tools these days. I use Terminator, which supports both horizontal and vertical screen split. Terminology is another option from a choice of many.
I thought, let me find something that people who used tmux have moved on to. That search led me, among other things, to “ditching tmux” thread on HackerNews, where in the comments a few people were talking about i3 tiling window manager.
