Mastodawn

jackofalltrades Jul 11, 2023

Can you please ELI5 tmux?

https://lemmy.ml/post/1931366

Can you please ELI5 tmux? - Lemmy

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.

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0xtero Jul 11, 2023

I guess the best analogy is a "virtual desktop" but for the terminal.
It's is a program which runs in a terminal and allows multiple other terminal programs to be run inside it.

Each program inside tmux gets its own "page" or "screen" and you can jump between them (next-screen, previous-screen etc).
So instead of having multiple terminal windows, you only have one and switch the screen/page inside it.

You can also detech from the program and leave it running - so next time you log on to the server, you can re-attach to it and all your screens/sessions are still there.

Did that help?

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nous

You can also split windows to have multiple terminals side by side, or above below each other. Many use it locally as a tileing window manager when their main terminal or window manager does not support tiling.