Comment by charlie-83

1 day ago

I think a key piece of context to Kovid's distain of tmux is how good window management is in kitty. I regularly have at least ten terminals open and navigating them is a breeze. I previously lived in tmux but much prefer this.

The session persistence thing is still best solved with tmux, however, I don't ever need this. Nohup is sufficient for long running commands where my ssh might fail. I don't really find myself sshing into a machine and then setting loads of env vars that I need to persist.

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charlie-83

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em-bee  1 day ago

i tried using kitty a year ago. i was not impressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40478732

kovid is talking about how tmux gets in the way of terminals adding new features. i agree with that, but what about the features that tmux offers that i have yet to see in any gui terminal. (multiple sessions. the ability to connect to the same session from multiple terminals. scriptability, including sending characters into a terminal. splitting windows into multiple panes...)

can kitty do any of those? if you want to add features to the terminal, then you have to content that tmux does as well, and maybe tmux features are more interesting to me than kittys. so if you want to win me over, then you have to actually implement some of the features of tmux that i use.

(watching the interview, it looks like kitty does indeed implement some of tmux features, because interestingly the interviewer asks just the right questions. but i need to look for a more comprehensive introduction to see how kitty can replace tmux locally.)

  • metaltyphoon  1 day ago

    It seems that WezTerm can do what you asked

    • em-bee  19 hours ago

      all right, a year ago i tried kitty: https://wezterm.org/config/files.html

      turns out that the config example for the color scheme conflicts with setting other config values. i need

          config.color_scheme = ...
    return config

 not 

    return { color_scheme = ... }

      that could have been explained better.

      and finally, how do i switch sessions or tabs? no word about that on the multiplex page. or elsewhere.

      fortunately, i found this article which describe an elaborate setup to make wezterm behave somewhat like tmux, with familiar keybindings. maybe i can get this to work: https://mwop.net/blog/2024-07-04-how-i-use-wezterm.html

      oh, one last issue: there are no resize handles, or a titlebar, although according to the descriptions they should be there. where did they go?

      3 replies →

jon-wood  1 day ago

More generally I use a tiling window manager which is already doing pane/tab layout for me, but doing that with every window I have, so I don't really want tmux acting as a separate window manager just for shells.

gchamonlive  1 day ago

For long running sessions I think screen is better... `nohup cmd &` is finnicky and I don't trust it to work on every software. I think `screen -S foo` and `screen -r foo` is much more ergonomic. No pipe to file, no disowned pid.