Customizing tmux

Systemd just does a poor job giving you a TTY on demand.

If you've used Neovim vs Helix, I'd say the comparison is pretty close.

Tmux is more customisable, but a lot messier out the box. It's much older so has picked up a little cruft along the way.

Zellij is newer so has the benefit of being a clearer implementation. But it's designed as an "out the bix" experience, not one you can customise to your hearts content.

Edit: if you did want to try out zellij, I should point out there's a "no install, try in shell" option on their website's main page which is a super quick way to get a taste!

Another ex-tmux user here: for it was text selection with mouse without extra line breaks, introduced by line wrapping when long strings are rendered.

I use F2 too. I can’t even remember why I started using it. I think maybe because KDE already had a similar binding so it because my de facto control pallet binding back before control pallets were a thing.

Ctrl+A conflicts with readline's "go to the start of line" (unless you're using vim key bindings in your shell, which I find uncomfortable).

I've been using Ctrl+Q, it replaces an almost completely useless key combo (flow control if I'm not mistaken), and is easy to press.

I also use backtick for my tmux leader key. It doesn't create issues for me in the terminal (but you need to tap it twice when you want a literal backtick). This became natural for me pretty quickly.

I have noticed that about an hour ago, so I don't think it was automatic. I guess I'm just curious why it was found to be against the guidelines or not representative of the topic in the post.

  > Okay, but sessions are one of the best things about tmux.

Locally or remotely? Remotely I fully agree. But remotely I can't open a new window and my machine doesn't have different workspaces.

  > Sessions aside

I'm curious about this actually. The opposite has been true in my experience. What keybindings are you missing? I can keybind essentially any script I want or any set of keystrokes.

  > uniform multiplexing of shell windows between local and remote environments is super useful for muscle memory.

I actually have the opposite experience. I mean I can bind ghostty splits to be identical to my tmux bindings, that's not an issue and trivial to merge. But I keep them separate because it contextualizes if I'm "here" or "there". Similarly I ensure that remote sessions have a different PS1 line so there are visual indications of where I am other than one small icon. Without this I find that it is easy to forget which machine I'm in. Had too many problems where I was running commands on one machine thinking I was in another.

> having uniform multiplexing of shell windows between local and remote environments is super useful for muscle memory.

Yep, this is why I use the same .tmux.conf on my servers and my local machines. I don't have to care about my terminal emulator - I might be using a fully featured Windows Terminal or iTerm, or I might be using xterm or st on some spartan system. My navigation works the same everywhere.

  > My navigation works the same everywhere.

Keybindings and uniform experience across machines is what does it for me.

  > I like that I can use tmux locally and remotely and thus have the same interface wherever I do my work

The reason I don't do this (even though a trivial config could make this possible) is I want more indications that I'm remote vs local. I'll even change the remote status bar (sometimes theme) so there's more visual indication (an icon helps, but it quickly becomes invisible, just like the hostname). To be clear, I don't have a pattern for every machine, just 2: local vs remote. Everything remote starts with my tmux binding (<C-b> sucks and requires an absurd hand movement, so I use <C-s> because who freezes these days?). With this I still keep all my muscle memory but have a clear signal of "remote vs local" and prevents silly mistakes.

  > (e.g. recently I was again trying to use flow <https://github.com/neurocyte/flow> and its next-tab and previous-tab shortcuts clash with Ghostty's)

I don't think I understand this example. There's only so many keybindings and clashes aren't uncommon. There's only 45 control commands (without shift or f-keys) and less than half are convenient due to reach (<C-6> sucks!). Even fewer when you start thinking about "sane defaults" and unfortunately those are biased by the past, so collisions become more likely.

Like I use vim so frequently hit <C-w> while typing and when I'm not on mac I kill browser tabs (probably for the best lol). But the benefit of all CLI programs is the config. There's no "one-size-fits-all" solution, so having configuration is the next best thing.

  > If I had a terminal that

I'm not sure what emulator doesn't meet these goals. Foot is a barebones solution, so that might be good for you. But if the issue is clashing with keybindings then that's an unavoidable problem, though luckily solvable. At least the emulators tend to provide better flexibility in this respect than most programs do.

I'm not quite sure I understand your pattern. Can you explain it more so I can better understand? Maybe I'm missing something and I'm always looking to improve my workflow.

Locally, I don't get the point. I can do tabs and splits. A session? That's another window. I can also hide that and use keyboard shortcuts to navigate towards it. Am I missing a local benefit?

The session is the thing I use, and I do use tmux every day, but I exclusively use it when in ssh as on a local machine I have everything I need. You mention the hybrid, but isn't the point that the connection is ephemeral? We don't exactly want to keep it alive unless we are actively using the connection, right? This is what I'm not understanding about your mixed scenario. What is the difference between what you do and me just opening another pane in ghostty and doing the ssh there. I can't detach from ghostty, but I can save the window state (or move to a different window in a different workspace or just cycle through windows like I would a session) so when I quit it it resumes, but honestly, I rarely quit it. Keeping a remote connection alive while there's no active usage seems like a waste and it's just going to disconnect when I walk away from my machine anyways. So what is the difference?

I do find sessions tend to get unruley easily, and more easily than windows just do to being hidden another level deeper. It's not too bad when single user, but I'd still suggest organizing tabs over multiple sessions, in most cases. That's because it is easy to just leave something like an editor open and accidentally overwrite files. Someone just logs back in after awhile and types :x into vim (or :x!) without thinking. It's also just too easy to let sessions stale. I haven't worked with a single person (myself included) who did not have a tmux session that was inactive for at least a month more than their last login time. (Better than all the hanging VSCode sessions though) That's like people using srun to run slurm jobs instead of submitting a batch job into the queue. That's totally fine to do when you're sitting in front of the sim but if you walk away and the code errors or just ends before your session ends then you're just hogging a machine that could be used (there wasn't even a benefit to this either!). Locally, it's pretty much the same thing except locally I can do all my tabs and splits and sessions without tmux.

I always find it annoying to manage nested tmux sessions so I usually use Kitty's keyboard driven tab management and tmux for server side sessions.

  set -g status-left "#{?client_prefix,#[bg=colour76]^,#[bg=colour235]_} [#S]"
  set -g status-right ' | #[fg=colour76]#h#[fg=default] %H%M%Z'

Yes, of course. What I'm trying to communicate is that if you're just doing things locally you can get all the benefits (sin sessions) from modern terminal emulators. Most people are using panes and tabs but switching to another terminal emulator will get you these and much more. If you're using the default terminal emulator, you should probably switch (you're installing a program anyways, right?).

That said, I still use tmux. Almost every day in fact. Because all my work is being done on a machine I'm not sitting in front of. This even includes at home. My main desktop is connected to a TV for videogames and movies. When I want to do work on it there's no difference if I'm sitting in front of my laptop or it other than it sitting in my livingroom keeps it cooler and gives it better air flow.

Edit:

Locally: my terminal emulator (ghostty) can do everything tmux can. I can do sessions (windows), panes, tabs, and all that. But with ghostty I also get images, a lower memory footprint (than stock emulator), lower CPU usage (than stock emulator), ligatures, and everything else. It is strictly better.

But I can't do {widows,panes,tabs} with remote connections. Hence, tmux. Which in that case, I will frequently give up capabilities (like images) for that.

  > What would you say is your favorite terminal

So far, ghostty. I do also like Alacritty and WezTerm, and think kitty is overhyped (and Warp is a privacy nightmare). A thing I really like about ghostty is it is incredibly easy to maintain. By far my smallest config file. Basically my theme and a few custom bindings. To be honest, there isn't a huge difference between all of them, with some being better at one thing than another, but I think ghostty gets things good all around.

Btw, vim bindings should already be available in your emulator, without the need for tmux. You can set bash to use them (set -o vi) but I suggest migrating to zsh if you like using the cli. I'll also give you one fun command most people don't know. While holding control, press x then e (if you are already using zsh you might need to add `zle -N edit-command-line` to your rc file but <C-x><C-e> needs no config in bash). I guess I should also mention that in vim you can open a terminal (:help term)

  > why as it relates to local development experience use? 

All these emulators can do, locally, everything tmux can do and more. You just have to remember that a session is the same thing as a window. All these emulators have tabs and splits. So there is no real advantage to tmux.

  > Are there features that these tools have that tmux lacks?

First off, switch because your emulator is probably more resource intensive. It may also be missing modern features like being able to view images (see sixel, chafa, or the kitty graphics protocol), ligatures, and a lot of other features.

Second, tmux lacks many of these modern features. Doing a passthrough can help but dealing with images is not a great experience. I have found no configuration where I can reliably view images and never have been able to produce images of the same quality. I always drop out of my session if I am entering a file browser like yazi or fzf (I'll use fzf but it limits the capabilities of previewing).

  > I prefer the idea of having one tool to manage everything: from local flow to remote sessions.

  > I usually do not view images in the terminal.

While this doesn't address that issue you can move a tab to a new window (session) as well as merge. I do wish this feature existed, but I use it so rarely that honestly I don't notice. Rarely are more than one pane essential in a given tab, so usually I solve this by cleanup. But yeah, I will acknowledge that limit.

This breaks rsync & many other things that rely on SSH as transport. Try:

  alias ssh="ssh -o RequestTTY=force -o RemoteCommand='tmux new -A -s foobar'"