The main problem with Tmux that no one talks about is its arcane configuration and interaction patterns. If you set up a ton of config while gritting your teeth, it begins to work well, but the configuration semantics are a nightmare. I would love something similar to tmux that has sane configuration and theming. I switched from XMonad to i3 for the same reason.
It’s a tmux plugin that replaces the default Ctrl-b keybindings with the same keybindings used in i3wm (including turning on automatic tiling instead of manual splitting). Given that you use i3wm on your desktop, you might like it :)
Sure, but how often do you need to touch that config?
Since I keep my configs in a repo, I just checked the last time I changed my `.tmux.conf`. Turns out it was 2018, and I changed a grand total of 2 lines. And I use tmux daily, not just remote, but also on my local machine.
So yeah, if I am using something for more than half a decade without requiring any change, then its pretty safe to say that whatever hassles the configuration of that something imposes, is completely irrelevant.
It's interesting we've had such opposite experiences with tmux configuration.
My home git log shows my first tmux configuration was in 2017. Since then, several options have been removed, they now throw an error on startup, and mess with muscle memory for key bindings that are essential to using a program like this.
This means that to get tmux working properly again I have to catch up on years of release notes to figure out what I'm supposed to change. I have never once had to do this with screen despite using it for over 20 years.
Any time my muscle memory is betrayed, I give up and go back to screen and don't bother touching tmux again for several months.
> Sure, but how often do you need to touch that config?
More often than I’d like! tmux config has broken backwards compatibility on me multiple times over the years.
This is fine for most software — you upgrade your config once and you’re done. However, the nature of tmux is that I use it on many servers, some old and some new, some with tmux 1.x and some with 2.x. Getting a ~/.tmux.conf from my dotfiles repo that works across both has been papercutty.
Love tmux though & can’t imagine tty life without it — I run it locally as well as on remote machines.
I’m one of the people who much prefers tmux’s “session groups” over its “sessions”. Alas, as far as I know, it’s entirely impossible to configure tmux to get session groups by default: it’s a command line option, not a configuration option.
> Sure, but how often do you need to touch that config?
It’s not only the config, though. It’s the arcane shortcuts and the weird way it seems to handle most things (trying to get the mouse working is a bloody nightmare and it regularly borks the terminal). I have a mouse with a scrolling wheel, for example. It works fine with most programs over ssh, why is it such a pain with tmux? Such pains remain even after having felt down the rabbit hole and spent 2 weeks tweaking settings.
iTerm2 is fantastic and I would be very happy to just use it and call the problem solved, but I don’t have a Mac at work.
> trying to get the mouse working is a bloody nightmare and it regularly borks the terminal
It's literally one line of config.
> It’s the arcane shortcuts and the weird way it seems to handle most things
Tmux is a TUI and the shell and other software running on it are themselves TUI. There will be conflict and the prefix solution is actually simple. Tmux solves one particular problem and solves it well. It's on you if you want it to be something else.
i am running half a dozen tmux sessions without any configuration at all, and a few more where the only configuration is to change the key for tmux commands away from ctrl-b. i used to have several more of those, but i am no longer nesting tmux sessions as much.
The main problem with Tmux that no one talks about is its arcane configuration and interaction patterns. If you set up a ton of config while gritting your teeth, it begins to work well, but the configuration semantics are a nightmare. I would love something similar to tmux that has sane configuration and theming. I switched from XMonad to i3 for the same reason.