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I use it daily locally, and find it amusing how many only think of it as being useful on remote servers (not to invalidate your use-case -- I'm just contrasting
by jrop 1y ago
I use it daily locally, and find it amusing how many only think of it as being useful on remote servers (not to invalidate your use-case -- I'm just contrasting my own use). As a precursor, I view UNIX as my IDE, of which tmux is a part: this IDE runs on Windows (WSL2), macOS, Linux, and Android (Termux). That aside, here are a few reasons I find tmux to be useful in this concoction of tools:
- Session management. I've written custom scripts for myself around this (zoxide + fzf). If you want to see how this can be used, look at ThePrimagen's workflow. I don't use his scripts but he has a good demo of how he harnesses sessions.
- Unified scrollback management - easily search the scrollback, yank it, etc. My favorite thing to do is to yank part of the scrollback, then `Prefix+B,=` to list everything I've yanked (think of this like a "clipboard manager" specific to tmux), select an entry, and press `e` to edit it in `$EDITOR`.
- This one might be a stretch, but I tend to try and use only terminal tools (without being utterly insane) because then tmux can be my "tiling window manager" no matter what OS I'm on. Oh, I have to use Windows for work? Not to worry, tmux runs in WSL2, as do most of my preferred tools, so I feel mostly at home even though I normally really dislike Windows.
- It's scriptable. Read `man tmux` and use your imagination!
Notwithstanding any of that, there are cons, the most apparent one being that I am limited to text-based tools this way. An example of this: getting images to work in tmux, though many modern terminal emulators support them, is a huge pane, so I haven't bothered.
- khamidou 1y agoThat's very helpful – thanks for taking the time.
- threecheese 1y agoFor the curious (like me), here’s more info on bullet 1 (session management): https://www.reddit.com/r/tmux/comments/1ch9tqp/primeagen_tmux_session_management/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tmux/comments/1ch9tqp/primeagen_tmu...