I forgot about tmux, because I don’t need it when I use Emacs and Emacs lets me think in a different way. Just learn the Emacs way, and you don’t need tmux.

I’ve used tmux inside a single vterm buffer for several years now, and together with vterm-toggle to toggle buffer visibility with a single keypress, it’s been a nearly perfect setup (apart from vterm-toggle messing up winner-mode’s undo history). I remapped the default tmux operator key to ‘;’ so it kinda logically fits with devil-mode, which I’ve been using for a few months.

I’ve also augmented vterm with custom functions, such as I can quickly cd to another dir using ivy completion in the minibuffer, which is much faster than using shell’s integrated completion system.

Join the cult of those of us who use emacs within tmux.

ssh remote_machine

# create a new screen session

screen -S multibuffer

emacs # console mode aka -nw

# do all the screen splits needed

# m-x shell to start any number of shells

# CTRL-D to disconnect

# leave machine

exit

# decide to go back

ssh remote_machine

# reconnect to existing shell

screen -r multibuffer

# tada! your shells are back

Try zellij, could save you a lot of time and trouble