20190204-tmux.txt
Tmux is a great terminal management program. I found it a while ago
(over a year, maybe?) while looking for vim videos on how to increase
productivity. For those of you who aren't familiar, tmux is a Terminal
MUltipleXer, meaning you have multiple virtual terminals on one screen
(usually tty0 in my case). You can split the window into multiple
panes and have terminals stacked on top of/next to each other. You can
create new windows. You can manage multiple sessions of multiple
windows.
It's actually quite fun messing around with the config file
(~/.tmux.conf). I have mine set up so the status bar displays my SSID,
Battery percent (and time remaining), and YYYYMMDD.HHmm in the top
right. I had to use quite a bit of sed (a program with which I'm even
less familiar) to clean out the status commands of extraneous text
(nmcli and upower).
One of the biggest advantages of tmux is copy/paste from TTY.
Copy/paste has been around for a while, and while you can natively do
it from XTerm and similar terminal emulators (which tend to run slower
than actual terminals), you can't do that natively from TTY. It's a
pain. Tmux allows you to scroll through text in the screen buffer and
copy/paste them (I recommend searching for "tmux copy paste" for more
details). The other enormous advantage of tmux is session saving. This
feature saves the state of your tmux panes, can run in the background,
and can be pulled up in new terminals or terminal emulators. If for
some reason you need to minimize tmux (to use framebuffer is my main
reason), you can "detach" (basically put tmux in background) the
session and re-enter your vanilla terminal with framebuffer. You can
even go to your desktop, attach the tmux session in a terminal
emulator, and copy/paste text from the GUI into your tmux pane.
What I'm saying is it's one of the most famous terminal managers and
that's for good reason: it is a very powerful tool for the modern
terminal user. Hopefully I'll be able to work out the .tmux.conf
conditionals so the status bar will display a warning or change color
for low battery.
