Great to see some love for tmux. Terminal vim + tmux is a lot more powerful than Gvim or MacVim.
That said, I started using vim with Janus and while it convinced me that vim could be a great modern editor, it left me too confused when I tried to make my own customizations. I ended up ditching it and hand-picking my own plugins. I suspect a completely new vim user would likely experience the same process with Maximum Awesome. Still, that doesn't mean these curated sets of plugins are a bad idea--if anything they can serve as a proof of concept for people who aren't yet convinced on the value of the editor.
A vim plugin pack could work very well—I think the problem is with many of the plugins, which were built to scratch the author's itch and inadvertently dig their tendrils into half of vim's functionality. That's sort of tolerable when installing them one at a time (and figuring out how to loosen their grip one at a time), but every time I've installed a plugin pack I've suddenly had a vastly different vim that was both buggy and much slower.
gitgutter, ctrlp, and pretty much anything from tpope are all great in this regard: they do one localized thing and it Just Works. (Downside is when that "one thing" is a shortcut or function, and with no other cues I forget I even have the plugin installed.) On the other hand I've had pretty terrible experiences with SuperTab, which required a lot of fiddling and still breaks my Tab key sometimes, and ctags is such a pain that I've never gotten around to making it actually work. But those are useful enough that they end up in most plugin bundles, so you get a Cartesian product of the interference and brokenness of all of them.
You realize you're the only one "going" when you pick just one single phrase out of his whole post and make this kind of remark on it, right? You're not exactly contributing to the discussion...
Basically, terminal multiplexing solves a different problem than window management solves. Terminal multiplexing gets you detach/reattach (letting you switch computers trivially), per terminal splits (which I frequently use in addition to WM tiling, similar to how I use Vim windows in addition to both of those), and better scrolling/highlighting.
Can you elaborate on this? I also use XMonad in connections with a simple xterm (although I used screen some years ago, but then I did not know about XMonad) but I do not get the idea of detaching/reattaching. Is the idea to save the state of the session?
If you are running tmux locally it would allow you to do things like kill X, log back in, open a new xterm, then pick up where you left off. The session isn't paused or suspended, it continues running the entire time even though the gui terminal emulator died.
If you are running tmux remotely, then it lets you start working at home on your laptop (over ssh), close your laptop, drive across town, turn your laptop back on, ssh back in, and pick up where you left off.
The way I use this at work is I have many long-running tmux sessions running on my desktop (one for each 'project', and one for a few interactive db sessions and the like). I then work over ssh with a fullscreened Putty instance. When I want to switch projects I can just hit C-b s then select the session I want to switch to.
At home I use a laptop with linux (and the Awesome WM (similar to xmonad, though less hardcore I suppose)) but most of my 'work sessions' are on various other machines. I ssh into them and connect to the correct session with tmux. Since Awesome lets me arrange windows with tags I do that a lot for work sessions (like tagging a few terminals and a browser window that has docs opened in it) but I consider those to be more ephemeral. I close them out when I start running low on resources (memory, cpu, battery, etc) but the tmux sessions live on (local or remotely).
(I use to use straight up xterm as well, but switched to urxvt because my new laptop has a high DPI screen that makes urxvt's nicer font rendering support sort of necessary.)
I'm restarting X all the time, so I'd see tmux with my test/log window a huge gain. For vim, I prefer gvim for better and faster rendering over any terminal.
How is urxvt's font rendering support better than xterm's?
Having
XTerm*faceName: Inconsolata
XTerm*faceSize: 14
in .Xresources gives me exactly the same result as with urxvt or gnome-terminal.
(P.S. Awesome is not at all less "hardcore", just works differently and is kind of a required taste.)
Agreed. I do still use MacVim quite a bit as it integrates well with environments that allow selection of an OS X app as editor. That said, a tmux + vim setup is a great combination, especially if mouse (well, trackpad) scrolling support is enabled in both.
I've picked up a few new tricks from their setup as well -- e.g. see the "Fix Cursor in TMUX" comment in vimrc.
That said, I started using vim with Janus and while it convinced me that vim could be a great modern editor, it left me too confused when I tried to make my own customizations. I ended up ditching it and hand-picking my own plugins. I suspect a completely new vim user would likely experience the same process with Maximum Awesome. Still, that doesn't mean these curated sets of plugins are a bad idea--if anything they can serve as a proof of concept for people who aren't yet convinced on the value of the editor.