To understand why you might want to use tmux try the following:
- Open your terminal
- Start editing a file with vim or nano but don’t save the file
- Close then re-open your terminal
You will have lost your progress, next we can repeat but this time using tmux so you don’t lose your session:
- Open your terminal
- Start a tmux session using
tmux
- Start editing a file again using vim or nano
- Close and re-open the terminal
- Type
tmux a
to re-attach to the existing session
Note that this time none of your progress is lost.
Aside from enabling you to have a persistent session, tmux also allows you to have multiple terminal panes open so you can do more than one thing at a time in the window, to see what I mean try this:
- Open your terminal
- Start a new tmux session using
tmux
- Type
top
to begin listing processes - Press
ctrl b
thento make a new split pane
- Enter
ls
or other terminal commands
You will see that you can use more than one panel to do things. This can be useful for example if you want to watch run tests and also run other commands.
Can’t wait for this to be released. IIRC a lot of it was built in the rust programming language which is a bit of interesting trivia