
Is tmux the GNU Screen killer? - tzury
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/is-tmux-the-gnu-screen-killer/1901
======
spatten
If you're unfamiliar with either screen or tmux and looking to learn one, then
I'd recommend going with tmux.

I just made that switch myself recently, and found getting things set up how I
liked them with screen extremely frustrating. With tmux, I was all set within
an hour. I tried screen for a couple of weeks, then tried tmux, and was hooked
almost immediately.

I found scripting tmux to be much simpler, and setting up things like having
the bottom bar notify me if there was new text in a window was _so_ much
easier in tmux.

Install on OS X was easy: brew install tmux

As a side benefit, having nested screen sessions (or nested tmux sessions) is
kind of annoying. My solution is to use tmux on my laptop, and run screen on
all of my servers. That way there's no nesting. I don't spend much time
mucking around on the server, but so far I've found this quite satisfactory.

~~~
pyre
My way around screen nesting is that I use non-standard key-bindings locally
(which I find a _lot_ better than the default ones), that way the default
screen key-bindings pass straight-through.

------
ciupicri
> There was talk of a version 4.1, which would include this functionality,
> being released “soon” — but that talk was as far back as February 2007, and
> GNU Screen 4.1 still has not materialized.

Fedora 15 comes with screen-4.1.0-0.3.20101110git066b098.fc15.x86_64. It's not
an official release, but it doesn't mean that user can not benefit from new
features like the vertical splitting mentioned by rbanffy.

~~~
1amzave
I found it to be quite buggy, however, so I built 4.00.03 from source and use
that instead. (Lack of vertical split doesn't bother me very much.)

------
travisjeffery
Tmux is slightly nicer than GNU Screen is some respects but I still use GNU
Screen.

For one, Screen is everywhere. I can go from system to system and it'll be
there.

Also, I use a Mac and Tmux doesn't work with the Mac's clipboard; probably the
biggest reason I can't use Tmux.

Screen has had vertical splitting for sometime now, just get a beta release or
build from source (<https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=screen>). That's what
I use and find very stable.

~~~
wizard_2
OSX clipboard integration? Can you elaborate?

~~~
spatten
Yes, I'd like to hear more about this too. Does screen integrate with the OS X
copy / paste buffer?

~~~
mfontani
You can select stuff with the mouse in the terminal and whatever you select is
then available to be pasted with CMD+V.

What the parent refers to is the ability to press C-b to enter the buffer
scroll, then select text there and unfortunately -- not -- having that
available to OSX's paste buffer, but only internally inside tmux.

This means that if you want to copy that stuff to OSX's paste buffer you have
to go through the intermediate step of pasting it inside a new buffer (say,
Vim) inside tmux, then select it _again_ with the standard terminal selection
feature and _only then_ it will be available to OSX's CMD+V.

hope that clears it up.

------
jvandenbroeck
Byobu ftw <http://dj-bri-t.net/2009/10/gnu-screen-and-byobu-made-easy/>

------
r00fus
Anytime I see "Is X the Y killer" it's no. Can we please have better link
titles?

~~~
spicycode
In this case I think tmux replaced screen easily over a year ago.

~~~
joeyh
[http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=screen+tmux&#...</a><p>tmux
still has a long hill to climb.<p>FWIW, my .screenrc is 4 lines. My .tmuxrc is
26 lines, and all it tries to do is get a behavior comprable to screen. Ie,
using the same ctrl-a, supporting ctrl-ac without needing to release ctrl
before the second character, allowing titles to pass thru tmux to the title
bar, etc.

~~~
pyre

      > my .screenrc is 4 lines. My .tmuxrc is 26 lines
    

You should see my screenrc.

    
    
      > all it tries to do is get a behavior comprable to screen
    

So, veering from the tmux defaults to change them to the screen defaults takes
more work in tmux than in screen? Go figure! I never would have guessed.
(Hint: It's easier in screen because they are the defaults)

I've never used tmux and I find your post to be biased towards screen. tmux
isn't being touted as a 'drop-in replacement' for screen, but that seems to be
how you are evaluating it.

------
technomancy
The biggest advantage of tmux is if you want to go multi-user. It can be done
with screen, but it involves some pretty heinous setuid hacks.

tmux doesn't invent its own permissions system; it just communicates over a
socket. Anyone with permissions to read the socket can join. Anyone with
permissions to write to the socket can interact. It's stupid easy.

------
mhansen
No, Byobu is. <https://launchpad.net/byobu>

~~~
rhdoenges
Byobu is really just a fancy configuration for screen. It still sits on top of
the crazy screen codebase.

~~~
tonfa
But it removes many pains from screen, an easy configuration tool makes it way
easier to use.

------
rmc
A (GNU Screen) Killer Feature: Provide an easy way to 'screen' an existing
running process.

~~~
adavies42
it's doable, but not terribly easy, at least as of last report. see retty
<http://pasky.or.cz/dev/retty/> or screenify
<http://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2008/msg00421.html>.

------
rbanffy
> A feature that GNU Screen users have wanted for a long time is vertical
> splitting

^A-| works just fine here. IIRC, it's been working for quite some time.

~~~
res0nat0r
This was added to the codebase a long time ago, the article is incorrect.

~~~
muppetman
Actually, the article is correct. However almost all distributions also add
the patch to the code before they compile it.

So vertical splitting, while not in the main tree yet, is pretty much
available if you've installed GNU screen on any recent Linux distribution.

------
mikey_p
tmux is pretty amazing, I use it almost exclusively over screen or byobu.

The only thing that beats it is iTerm2 on OS X in terms of ease of splitting,
tabs, and ability to scroll each pane using mouse scroll wheel, etc.

~~~
pilif
Soon you will be able to get both:
<http://code.google.com/p/iterm2/wiki/TmuxIntegration>. This means that you
will get iterm's native window splitting if you use tmux inside iterm or plain
tmux if you are using another terminal

~~~
moe
I welcome every effort to supplement the crummy OSX window manager, but the
iTerm tiling system is sadly a false start.

They have the tab/split metaphor backwards. Real tiling WMs (such as ion3) put
tabs on the individual split panes instead of having one global tab bar at the
top - and for good reasons.

As it stands you can not, for example, drag an iTerm tile to its own window or
group multiple sessions in one tile. This may seem minor to the casual user
but is a showstopper for those of us who would benefit from the tiling the
most.

------
anonymousDan
Will there ever be a windows equivalent of screen? At the moment I can emulate
its tabbing functionality using Console2, but that is still a long way short
of the power of screen.

~~~
Raphael_Amiard
You can do a minimal install of cygwin including screen, and then run it in
console2. It is workgin quite nicely for me.

~~~
brunoqc
There's also mintty which I think it's putty without the network and serial
code.

I use it to copy/paste with the mouse. You can also set "UTF-8" in the options
if you need.

------
rbanffy
It took me about 15 seconds, a window resize, a horizontal split, a vertical
one and a couple rotate windows to crash it.

~~~
brunoqc
* I found a bug! What do I do?

Please send bug reports by email to nicm@users.sourceforge.net or tmux-
users@lists.sourceforge.net. Please include as much of the following
information as possible:

\- the version of tmux you are running;

\- the operating system you are using and its version;

\- the terminal emulator you are using and the TERM setting when tmux was
started;

\- a description of the problem;

\- if the problem is repeatable, the steps to repeat the problem;

\- for screen corruption issues, a screenshot and the output of "infocmp
$TERM" from outside tmux are often very useful.

<http://tmux.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tmux/trunk/FAQ>

------
trezor
Everytime I see "GNU Screen killer", I think it has the same chance of
surviving as "iPhone killers" or "iPod killers". It might be better, but being
touted as something which will "kill" something established, it's almost
always doomed to "fail", that term (also) being warranted or not.

I still see little reason to part from screen after all these years, and
despite various offers of "better" options troughout the years. On the other
hand, I did ditch my iPhone for an Android-phone. Although it was an Android-
phone not labeled as an "iPhone killer".

~~~
pyre
So a single blog post touting something as an 'X killer' is enough to make
that product bad?

~~~
trezor
I'm not saying the product is bad, only that if it gets recognized or talked
about as an "X killer" it will almost always fail deliver the specified
"killing", and hence it's a "failure" in that regard. You also risk creating
higher expectations than you can reasonably deliver.

So basically, announcing your product as or having people talk about your
product as a killer of any sort, is mostly a bad thing, be it a good product
or not. You want people to say "it's very good", not "it's an X-killer".

Or at least that is my experience and opinion on "X killer" as a branding-
strategy.

------
chrisjsmith
I found tmux to be more intuitive and it actually works out of the box in a
pleasant manor on both openbsd and debian without acres of configuration. That
was enough for me to switch from screen.

------
mahmud
Front page? really? Do people even try to come up with article subjects
lately?

