Why tmux over screen

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Some of the major reasons I prefer tmux over screen : Status bar is much easier to use. Almost any command you can run inside tmux can be run from a shell with tmux command [args]. This makes it very easily scriptable, as well as making it easy to do complex commands. Much more accurate automatic window renaming. While screen sets the title based on the first word of the command, and requires shell configuration to do even that in a shell window, tmux keeps track of what processes are actually running in each window, and updates the title accordingly.

This way you get dynamic renaming with any shell and zero configuration. For example: Let's say you're running Z Shell; the window's name would be "zsh". While sudo is asking for your password, the window's name will be "sudo", but once you've done that and sudo launches emacs , the title will be "emacs".

When you're all done and you exit emacs , the title will change back to "zsh". This is pretty useful for keeping track of windows, and it can also be especially useful in specific situations, like if you have some long-running process in another window that occasionally prompts you for input using dialog ; the window name would change to "dialog" when that happened, so you would know you had to switch to that window and do something.

Nicer session handling IMHO. You can do a lot more with sessions within tmux itself. You can easily switch, rename, etc. The downside of this is that if the server crashes, you lose everything; I've never had the server crash on me, though. There are updates pretty frequently, and you can file a bug report or feature request according to this FAQ and get an answer within a few days. However, as pointed out in a comment, screen 's lack of development is mostly because it's stable.

It's basically done, not abandoned. That said, if it can't do something now, it probably won't ever be able to, and long-standing issues are less likely to be fixed. Though, to be fair, vertical splitting is one feature that screen didn't have when I first answered this question and does have now.

Improve this answer. GNU Screen is almost 25 years old , so they've fixed most of the bugs. And the second point as stated is not really a difference as it applies to screen as well unless you can be more specific.

The screen package is deprecated and not included in RHEL8. Show 1 more comment. Jay Mody 1 1 bronze badge. Are the laggy keystrokes only when pressing Esc? Set escape-time to a lower value like And I believe you can move panes around with join-pane. Well, tmux sucks with vim , in some cases mine namely , no solution ever posted anywhere works, and even people spending some time solving the issue of mine weren't able to.

No vertical splits without patch except on Ubuntu I don't think that is true. I've been using screen for a few years now and I never had any issues splitting horizontally or vertically on Debian and Fedora. Even on Android with Termux it works like a charm.

Forivin The previous comment was made in when screen 4. Switching between the two is not overly complicated, as much of screens functionality has also found its way into tmux, though if you are a power user of either one, you will likely find some frustrations when switching to the other. As with any program, it really depends on your needs, and which you are more comfortable with. Give them both a try and see which you play nicely with.

Python Javascript Linux Cheat sheet Contact. What else does it offer? I wonder if you know TouchZoomDesktop. I use it in presentations. You're book is great for getting up to speed with tmux basics. The intro to tmuxinator was also pretty helpful.

One of the bigger things I think people miss is copying text into and out of tmux panes, including to the clipboard. This saves me a lot of time switching between windows often, especially using the vi keybindings. Although one thing I wish tmux did better was handling things like dividers.

Can you elaborate? And what do you mean about handling dividers? I thought the book was great. It's a quick read, but easily increased what I could do with tmux. I can't think of much more it really needs. Maybe cover stuff like if-shell? The true-color patch might also be worth mention. Just using tmux to get more than one terminal was really only a fraction of the stuff I could use it for. My terminal launches in XMonad use tmux by default now.

As far as the copy stuff, I'm talking about pipe or line dividers in terminal apps e. If whatever I'm trying to copy covers more than one line, tmux will copy over the divider which is painful. I've had success with kwm[0], it works more like bspwm than i3 but has been the best tiling experience I've found on OS X.

And has focus follows mouse!!!! I tried this but experienced random crashes and stuff so I gave up. I plan to look at it when it's a little more along. Myrmornis on March 15, root parent prev next [—].

I bought your book too, thanks for writing it! I found it helpful and it got me started scripting tmux sessions. I plan to try tmuxinator but haven't yet.

For some reason I've ended up using a combination of i3, tmux, and Emacs window splitting, all at the same time. So three different programs that do something like window management, each with its own set of behaviors and keystrokes. This sounds like it should be a nightmare, but it's actually not that bad. Others have mentioned the additional benefits of tmux beyond window management, but I also find that, much as I like i3, it's actually pretty hard to quickly and intuitively create, manipulate and delete window splits.

Ie, top-bottom, side-by-side, rotate splits, stuff like that. The containers thing just seems unweildy, and just getting windows into the right containers always feels like a fight. I used to use StumpWM, and while that had its own problems, you could bang things next to each other for a second without having to really think about it. Part of it is probably that I end up very rarely needing top-level window splitting, so I never get used to the keybindings.

Splitting in the terminal and in Emacs takes care of most of my needs; I want to see different programs side by side no more than once every few weeks.

PS: There's a program called Sway that's basically a Wayland fork of i3. It's coming along nicely, and you get that nice feeling of being retro and advanced at the same time. I've found this a bit painful too but it gets better if you configure your window management keys with similar bindings. But I still do find it a bit annoying to have three levels of windowing vim, tmux, bspwm when I'd be happy with just one. Tiling is the least useful thing that tmux does.

Event the name tmux implies that it's core competency is something else entirely -- multiple sessions, kept open, switching between them, persisting, etc. Exactly this. I open tmux on remote connections, maybe to panel Altho scrolling through output in tmux sucks , but definitely in case I lose my connection while running a longer process. My other favorite use is screen sharing without screen sharing 2 people connecting to the same session , super helpful when taking control over screens share is too slow due to network lag.

I use vnc on X with twm for persistent sessions and sharing. The benefit is that you can run a web browser on it. Which is painful when you don't have a fast internet connection. I'd agree that tiling is the less useful function, but the name refers to the tiling.

Tmux is short for Terminal Multiplexer, in other words, it's a program that turns one terminal into multiple terminals, by way of tiling. The name does not refer to the tiling - one can multiplex by time slicing. I assert that this was the original intent of the usage. OK, I said "tiling" instead of "window management", I should have been more precise but instead opted to use the same language the parent used. The parent said "tiling" and I assume they were referring to, well, tiling - putting multiple non-overlapping windows on the screen at the same time by dividing up the available space.

A USB hub multiplexes a USB port by making it so that multiple USB devices can be connected to the same port and all pretend that they're the only ones connected to it. The Ogg container format multiplexes a bitstream so that multiple timecoded media streams can be streamed through the same data channel and pretend that they're the only things going through it.

An preemptive-multitasking OS kernel multiplexes the CPU so that multiple processes can run on the cpu and all pretend that they're the only ones on it A terminal multiplexer multiplexes the terminal so that multiple processes can output to the terminal and all pretend that they're the only ones using it. That describes the window management functions of tmux. It has nothing to do with "window management". In fact it could also offer no window management at all, except for switching between sessions, which is was what it did initially.

Multiplexing is a well known, precise term, and terminal multiplexing as a technique existed before both tmux and its introduction of tiling e. If you're really looking to do something strange, you could ditch the mouse all togeter. That's what I've done on one of my laptops.

For some reason when i first set it up the touchpad didn't work, and need some driver or something. Instead of fixing it like a normal person, I said to me self "just go with it". The scrolling in the browser highlighted weird stuff since the mouse cursor was always in the middle of the screen , but once I found a way to set the cursor to the top-left of the screen when X starts a command in.

I still have a minor issue every once and while. Sometimes i'll browse around and see a code snippit, or just some text I'd like to copy-paste, or a link with a url I'd like to copy and I'm not sure how.

That's really been my only downside of going mouse-free. That's what i3 does as the previous poster showed. This very useful info for me as well. I have periodic pains in my neck when using mouse for too much.

I have been switching hands. But still. I much prefer emacs-like interface where I can operate with keyboard only. And I like shells because I can connect from anywhere to the server where I do most dev and testing. However, I recently started doing android development and and I am forced to leave my emacs and shells. One reason is the running the emulator. It cannot run on remote x window sessions and I have to use mouse to access it.

The other reason is AndroidStudio. Although I use emacs with flymaker, as a newcomer to Android -- I find Android Studio's tools to do code refactoring, on the fly suggestions, detection of new versions of updates, very useful. I also swap hands and try to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible.

I go mostly mouseless by choice. Since I can move the mouse I have no need for the pointer lock but I use unclutter a small utility that makes the mouse disappear when it's not used for a time. For copying, qutebrowser has caret mode I believe the hotkey is 'V' that lets you move the pointer with the keyboard and visually select and copy text as you would with vim. Copying url's is done with the 'y' hotkey and a terminal emulator I use termite has a hotkey for finding and opening urls from the terminal.

I use keyboard as much as possible but find for things like flash one needs to click. Would you mind sharing your xinit snippit to set cursor location? BTW my browsing experience with keyboard only is made largely painless by chrome with vimium. You can also select and yank text with this. Why might someone need flash? That was literally the last thing i was expecting in a discussion on HN about why someone might need a mouse!

Checkout keynav, from the same author of xdotool, Jordan Sissel, pretty cool dude. BooneJS on March 14, parent prev next [—]. I use tmux as a persistent terminal multiplexor on a higher-than-preferred latency connection. I'm worried that i3 over VNC would be even slower, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Do you use i3 on a local or a remote Linux machine? I'd never heard of mosh before but this is just what I've been looking for.

It depends on whether or not vnc is bandwidth limited on your link. A high bandwidth, high-latency connection shouldn't feel significanlty different over vnc or a terminal, but if your high-latency is due to being bandwith-limited, vnc will be much worse.

You just open your terminal and connect on ssh as usual. SilverSurfer on March 15, parent prev next [—]. I share the same feeling as for the splitting feature alone. Since I switched to i3 I completely stopped to use tmux. I have to say, I'm a happy i3 AND tmux user. Tmux for persistance, and i3 for x11 windows. I've been using stumpwm for several years now, and I just love it. I use i3 for tiling graphical windows, but I use tmux for tiling and multiplexing terminal panes. The reason I prefer using tmux for terminal stuff is so that I only ever need one terminal window open, I can use the same tool when connected to remote machines with only one connection, etc.

I never understood 'tmux as a window manager'. Well ok if you're not on Linux or working remotely it makes sense.

The benefit of i3, though, is that a terminal is just another window, and the direct navigation happens between windows. The right side of the status bar shows the hostname, and the time and date. The left side shows the following session-related information:.

Unless you configure your own status bar. Commands are given to tmux using keystrokes, and there are two parts to this. You then quickly press the next key to send a command to tmux. Commands are given by pressing letters, numbers, punctuation marks, or arrow keys.

The status bar turns amber. Press Y to close the window or N if you change your mind. If you press Y, the window closes. Because this is the only window in this session, the session is terminated. To start tmux with a session name, use the new new session command, and the -s session name option. Now we have two windows in the session; one is running top , and the other dmesg.

We can only see one at a time, though more on that in a moment. Take a look at the left side of the status bar. In window zero, top is running, and in window one, dmesg is running. You can also choose a window from a list. The bottom section of the display shows a preview of the content in the highlighted window.

Press Enter to move to the highlighted window, or Esc to leave the window list without switching. The session disappears and becomes a background session. We return to the original terminal window. It also reminds us of the name we gave to the session. To be clear, this is a list of sessions. The similar display we saw earlier was a list of windows in a single session.

The bottom section displays a preview of the content in the highlighted session. Press Enter to move to the highlighted session or window or Esc to leave the session list without changing sessions.

If you select a new session, your current one detaches, and the one you selected is attached. However, you can do this with sessions that are still attached to their original terminal windows. When you do, any screen changes will appear simultaneously in both tmux sessions.