Comment by plett
1 day ago
I view "you might not need tmux" in the same way as "you might not need browser tabs".
Yes, if you only have one or two terminal sessions or open web pages then you can probably live without using them, but anything beyond that leads you into reimplementing features to cope with your desktop's lack of ability to manage dozens of windows.
That is something I have strived for recently, to use all the great window management features of my window manager of choice instead of browser tabs or lots of terminal tabs running tmux. If that didn't work well I guess it would have been a good sign that I need a better window manager. Even went back to use bookmarks instead of leaving hundreds of tabs open and having a bookmark bar instead of a tab bar is not bad at all.
> I view "you might not need tmux" in the same way as "you might not need browser tabs".
A big difference is that I can move two browser tabs into separate windows, or from separate windows into the same.
The same is actually tree of top-level windows if your window manager can group windows into tabs.
tmux tabs lack this flexibility.
I have come to believe that tab management is really the job of the window manager not individual apps. My window manager allows me to tile windows, or create tabs out of overlapping windows. The tabs can be from the same app or even different ones.
My tmux config has clickable tabs in one terminal.
MS Windows has excellent multi window management with Alt Tab Win Tab etc. Far superior to others.
I have all my terminals with distinct icons and background colours to tell them apart. The operating system (Windows) does the heavy lifting.
i tried Mac for about five years but missed MS Windows “every window can be alt tabbed to”. Mac has “every app can be command tabbed to and therein each app has its own subwindow management”
> MS Windows has excellent multi window management with Alt Tab Win Tab etc. Far superior to others.
If by "others" you mean Mac, okay, but KDE and some other Linux desktops are at least as good as Windows at this out of the box, and much more customisable.
> “every app can be command tabbed to and therein each app has its own subwindow management”
This is so, so annoying. Your Mac app’s window is minimized? No alt-tab for you!
Just CMD+TAB to your required app, then hit ↓ arrow and you get access to all your windows. Minimised windows appear at the bottom of the screen.
Just don’t minimize the window. Removing a window from the alt-Tab list is basically the only reason to minimize it in the first place on Mac. (Not reflexively minimizing windows does take some time to get used to if you’re coming from Windows, admittedly.)
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WindowMaker under GNU/Linux and BSD was like that too...
But, OFC, both WindowMaker and Mac OSX come from the same NeXT grandaddy...
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Windows has basic window and desktop management, but I would hardly describe it as excellent. Most tiling window managers would provide those features and then more.
Whatever fits your mental model I suppose, but every window is accessible via keyboard shortcuts on the Mac too, it just needs a different approach.
Do you know if there is a way to quickly switch between only two individual windows in different applications? A very common paradigm for me is swapping between two windows, for example a terminal session for code editing and a browser window for reference. On Windows and most Linux WMs, this is just a quick alt-tab hit to toggle between the two most recently focused windows. As I know there is no way to do this on macOS without bringing _all_ the windows to the foreground, which is not what I want. This is my #1 complaint about macos, I'd be so happy if there is just some shortcut I'm missing to accomplish this.
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Alt-tab? You mean pressing win+w under CWM to fuzzy-find windows per title name, and then spawn it?
But many terminals have tabs so if all you desire is more than one terminal open but not multiple ui windows there are other options. VSCode for instance!
byobu+tmux lets me log into a remote machine once and then have multiple named sessions/workspaces each having multiple named tabs. The sessions persist when I disconnect and are there when I reconnect the next day. Is that possible with terminal tabs?
That's why the browser tabs analogy breaks down.