Turbo-charge your command-line workflow with Tmux

Tutorials – Tmux

Article from Issue 193/2016
Author(s):

Operate multiple terminal sessions in a single window.

Unless you're some kind of hard-core raw X Window System user who doesn't need to resize or move around any of your applications, chances are that you're running a window manager of some sort. This may be a standalone window manager like Fluxbox, a tiling variant like i3, or perhaps one that's part of a larger desktop environment, such as Xfce, KDE, or Gnome. Window managers are one of the most essential tools for our work – but can they actually be used in text mode?

Well, yes. It might sound a bit weird at first, given that the command line is all about typing and viewing text and doesn't have the same requirements as a pointy-clicky, frill-laden desktop environment. But consider the typical work you do at a Bash prompt: Do you have a single terminal running at maximum screen resolution? Unless you're still rocking a netbook, chances are you have multiple terminals in action at any one point, using your window manager to organize them.

Now, imagine you could leave your window manager out of this and do the work of organizing different sessions inside a single terminal window. This is what Tmux, the "terminal multiplexer" does – and it does it very well [1]. With Tmux, you effectively have a text-mode window manager available at the command line, so you can create different views (e.g., with a big main command-line view for your day-to-day work and smaller views next to it for monitoring logs or IRC channels).

[...]

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