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.

Edit: if my phrasing is a bit awkward or confusing I apologize since I am not an English native speaker. (Maybe that’s why I never fully grasped what tmux is from other explanations xD)

Edite: Ok, just to clarify, my original struggle was to understand what made tmux different from using some terminal app and just split the screen xD

  • @lloram239@feddit.de
    3•1 year ago

    The most common use case for tmux is to put long running terminal apps in the background when working remotely, e.g.:

    # start a new virtual terminal
tmux

# do something in the terminal that will take a long while to complete
sleep 1m

# put the virtual terminal into the background
Ctrl-b d

# do other stuff

# reattach to the virtual terminal
tmux a

    This allows you to disconnect from the server, but keep the process running in the background. It can also do split screen with multiple terminals, provide a scroll back buffer (Ctrl-b PageUp) and other stuff. But using it for background processes is probably the most common one.