I spend a lot of my time using VIM. About 6 months ago I started using tmux. I can honestly say I love it. It was a little rough at first but I just made a cheat sheet on a piece of paper the size of a business card. That helped a lot. The default keys start to feel okay just like with VIM. I don’t have any problem with people customizing tools however they want so this post is really great. Anything that lowers the barrier for entry and or improves things is great.
Personally I like to try the defaults for a reasonable length of time to see if there is maybe some logic behind why they were chosen. I’ve gotten so used to the defaults now that I don’t think I would change too much except for this one thing:
- Opening a new pane or window was customized to start in the folder where the command was originated from.
Mislav Marohnić has a super nice method of moving between tmux splits and vim splits the same way so you don’t really get stuck thinking one split is actually the other.
This would drive me crazy, but after a little hacking, my tmux/vim combo feels so nice and snappy.
People do seem to often complain about the tmux defaults or say their particular configuration is "sane" and the defaults are not. But if you look at changes people make or at requests made over the years, they are all over the place and there is rarely a single common consensus on how the defaults could be better. Even if you look at something like "tmux-sensible", it is maybe a dozen lines of changes, of which some are now obsolete, some have downsides that prevent them being the default , and some are obviously personal preference.
I did have new panes and windows default to the current working directory for a while, and I in fact do this in my own config, but there are security concerns and it was felt it was better that people have to configure it explicitly if they want it.
Personally I like to try the defaults for a reasonable length of time to see if there is maybe some logic behind why they were chosen. I’ve gotten so used to the defaults now that I don’t think I would change too much except for this one thing:
- Opening a new pane or window was customized to start in the folder where the command was originated from.