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I wanted to mention that `zmx` is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use. Uses a ghostty-based terminal e

by jvican 2mo ago

I wanted to mention that `zmx` is a beautiful piece of minimal software that basically has gotten rid of my tmux and zellij use. Uses a ghostty-based terminal emulator for each session, supports pretty much all of these features by leveraging ghostty. I truly don’t see the benefit of something like herdr over this minimal, robust setup. If I really wanted a lot of customization for AI assistants, I’d consider using Orca, but my current zmx approach works OOB and it’s solid. Great software!

hiAndrewQuinn 2mo ago
https://zmx.sh/ https://zmx.sh/ for the lazy.
jeremyjh 2mo ago
I don't understand what it does. The homepage says it doesn't provide windows, panes or splits. What is it used for?
- chuckadams 2mo ago
  Provides a daemonized terminal basically, so you can attach and detach it freely. Other UI concerns are left to other layers.
  - jeremyjh 2mo ago
    So likely that is neovim running all my terminal/repl/agent/editor panes and tabs?
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
fwlr 2mo ago
Thank you for mentioning zmx. Reading through their repo, it’s like someone read my mind, took my instinctive, almost pre-verbal, half-formed/quarter-baked preference for `screen` over `tmux`, beautifully and precisely formalized it into an actually lucid opinion, and then instantiated it as an actually real piece of software. I’ve used it for an hour and it already feels like second nature; I somehow have muscle memory for features that I didn’t even know it had until I instinctively used them and they were right where I expected them to be. Seriously, thank you.
- jvican 2mo ago
  My pleasure. Make sure you check out the thriving ecosystem of tools around it as well. I’ve seen a few projects building on it in a prettt creative way.
pixard 2mo ago
I really want to like this. Ideologically I'm on board. Who wouldn't want to avoid all this multiplexing complexity and pitfalls? But deferring the window management to the OS sounds great in theory, but in practice it falls short (at least for me). I work on both MacOS and Linux. Even if I were to figure out a perfect window management approach, I'd have to do it twice, and then figure out a way to "attach" to a layout of windows essentially. And then make it cross-platform... or live with zero organization, or at best some kind of flat structure. That's a immediate non-starter. Even if I focused only on a single OS, I still don't consider this a viable approach. It would be like removing browser tabs, and saying let's let the OS manage all this nasty UI stuff. So then the next immediate idea is let's just have the Terminal itself manage UI. Ghostty supports tabs, splits etc. Great. But if I need to restart Ghostty for whatever reason, my entire layout vanishes and I have to set it all up again? For me tmux is not just about the attach/detach part. A session is a personal "layout" of the workspace I've organically landed on for this task. Maybe it's a few windows with splits. Maybe it's just the single window with or without a split. Maybe it's a more browser-like just X amount of windows (tabs). If/when things get overwhelming I branch off into a new session for one (or more) sub-tasks. Little fzf-based utilities allow for nice fuzzying over sessions and what not. Or maybe you just run the different sessions in actual different physical OS windows. You can mix and match however you feel that day. So if I'm in project x, working on feature y, and I detach and walk over to my other computer I can SSH over and continue as if nothing at all changed and retain the exact layout of what I was using before. Simultaneously in another physical window (or a tab) I can just switch to another local (or not) session and instantly be mentally in a different context, working on a different project or feature. Or I can SSH into a server and resume a debugging session left (intentionally) open for a while (which may consist of a few splits/windows/what not). Maybe I'm missing something. I'm curious how your day-to-day workflow looks like. I imagine if I was 100% bound to a single machine, I could make it work with a tiling wm. But even then Ghostty crashes or something else happens and poof your entire work layout is gone and needs to be re-created (even if the individual pieces are safe).
- christophilus 2mo ago
  Niri is a perfect window manager approach, in my opinion. I don’t need tmux. Just Niri + Foot (terminal) and it’s perfect for the way my brain works. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommended it.

by jvican 2mo ago

hiAndrewQuinn 2mo ago

https://zmx.sh/ https://zmx.sh/ for the lazy.

jeremyjh 2mo ago

I don't understand what it does. The homepage says it doesn't provide windows, panes or splits. What is it used for?

chuckadams 2mo ago
Provides a daemonized terminal basically, so you can attach and detach it freely. Other UI concerns are left to other layers.
- jeremyjh 2mo ago
  So likely that is neovim running all my terminal/repl/agent/editor panes and tabs?

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

fwlr 2mo ago

Thank you for mentioning zmx. Reading through their repo, it’s like someone read my mind, took my instinctive, almost pre-verbal, half-formed/quarter-baked preference for `screen` over `tmux`, beautifully and precisely formalized it into an actually lucid opinion, and then instantiated it as an actually real piece of software. I’ve used it for an hour and it already feels like second nature; I somehow have muscle memory for features that I didn’t even know it had until I instinctively used them and they were right where I expected them to be. Seriously, thank you.

jvican 2mo ago
My pleasure. Make sure you check out the thriving ecosystem of tools around it as well. I’ve seen a few projects building on it in a prettt creative way.

pixard 2mo ago

I really want to like this. Ideologically I'm on board. Who wouldn't want to avoid all this multiplexing complexity and pitfalls? But deferring the window management to the OS sounds great in theory, but in practice it falls short (at least for me). I work on both MacOS and Linux. Even if I were to figure out a perfect window management approach, I'd have to do it twice, and then figure out a way to "attach" to a layout of windows essentially. And then make it cross-platform... or live with zero organization, or at best some kind of flat structure. That's a immediate non-starter. Even if I focused only on a single OS, I still don't consider this a viable approach. It would be like removing browser tabs, and saying let's let the OS manage all this nasty UI stuff. So then the next immediate idea is let's just have the Terminal itself manage UI. Ghostty supports tabs, splits etc. Great. But if I need to restart Ghostty for whatever reason, my entire layout vanishes and I have to set it all up again? For me tmux is not just about the attach/detach part. A session is a personal "layout" of the workspace I've organically landed on for this task. Maybe it's a few windows with splits. Maybe it's just the single window with or without a split. Maybe it's a more browser-like just X amount of windows (tabs). If/when things get overwhelming I branch off into a new session for one (or more) sub-tasks. Little fzf-based utilities allow for nice fuzzying over sessions and what not. Or maybe you just run the different sessions in actual different physical OS windows. You can mix and match however you feel that day. So if I'm in project x, working on feature y, and I detach and walk over to my other computer I can SSH over and continue as if nothing at all changed and retain the exact layout of what I was using before. Simultaneously in another physical window (or a tab) I can just switch to another local (or not) session and instantly be mentally in a different context, working on a different project or feature. Or I can SSH into a server and resume a debugging session left (intentionally) open for a while (which may consist of a few splits/windows/what not). Maybe I'm missing something. I'm curious how your day-to-day workflow looks like. I imagine if I was 100% bound to a single machine, I could make it work with a tiling wm. But even then Ghostty crashes or something else happens and poof your entire work layout is gone and needs to be re-created (even if the individual pieces are safe).

christophilus 2mo ago
Niri is a perfect window manager approach, in my opinion. I don’t need tmux. Just Niri + Foot (terminal) and it’s perfect for the way my brain works. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommended it.