I am fairly familiar with Linux, I’ve been using different distros for some years now and have done some config editing here and there. I am also a web developer and use the terminal quite a lot and so I always stumble on people’s recommendation to use tmux and how good it is, but I never really understood what it does and, in layman’s terms, how can it be useful and for what use cases.
Can you guys please enlight me a bit on this?
Thank you.
Edit: if my phrasing is a bit awkward or confusing I apologize since I am not an English native speaker. (Maybe that’s why I never fully grasped what tmux is from other explanations xD)
Edite: Ok, just to clarify, my original struggle was to understand what made tmux different from using some terminal app and just split the screen xD
To understand why you might want to use tmux try the following:
- Open your terminal
- Start editing a file with vim or nano but don’t save the file
- Close then re-open your terminal
You will have lost your progress, next we can repeat but this time using tmux so you don’t lose your session:
- Open your terminal
- Start a tmux session using
tmux - Start editing a file again using vim or nano
- Close and re-open the terminal
- Type
tmux ato re-attach to the existing session
Note that this time none of your progress is lost.
Aside from enabling you to have a persistent session, tmux also allows you to have multiple terminal panes open so you can do more than one thing at a time in the window, to see what I mean try this:
- Open your terminal
- Start a new tmux session using
tmux - Type
topto begin listing processes - Press
ctrl bthen%to make a new split pane - Enter
lsor other terminal commands
You will see that you can use more than one panel to do things. This can be useful for example if you want to watch run tests and also run other commands.
