In Byobu, you simply need to create a new session. Ctrl-Alt-F2. Then Alt-Up/Alt-Down to move among sessions. Each user can have their own session easily like this! Shift-F1 for the hotkeys, if you need a reminder ;-)

What would you know about byobu :-)

Ctrl-ALT-F2 would take a miracle to work. Shift does as you describe, but the net effect is still nowhere what is intended.

Also note I am the same user. The functionality I want is how byobu behaves with screen. eg you can start 3 xterms, in each one run byobu. And each one can jump around as they see fit all sharing the same screen session. No work, no fuss and exactly sane.

The tmux behaviour baffles me. I can't understand why anyone would want all their viewers to change in sync. Short of a classroom demo environment, it really doesn't make sense as a default.

I'd be delighted if by default byobu did whatever was needed to make tmux behave usefully.

Interesting... Frankly, I love the tmux default, to sharing the window, while also supporting the concept of "sessions". The shared view makes paired programming with a colleague across the world, while on the phone or a video conference super easy. Different users start in the same "session", and share the view of "windows" and "panes (aka splits)". If they want separate views/control, then they start separate sessions.

For your usecase I can understand. But when it is the same user using defaults it makes absolutely no sense. Why would they want separate xterms on the same display to be in lockstep by default?

Am I the only one who runs more than one terminal at a time? What happens now is I start an xterm on monitor #1 and start byobu within that. Various windows (whatever you switch amongst on pressing F3 and F4) are started - eg one might be client code running, one might be server code, one might be a database server etc. But sometimes for example I want to look at the client code output and server output simultaneously. At that point I switch byobu to the client window, and start a new terminal on monitor #2 and tail logs or whatever is appropriate. It is an annoying pain that I can't just run byobu and switch as I see fit.

In any event this is a multi-year frustration for me. People keep coming with convoluted workarounds (pointing tmux to tmux as far as I can tell) which it then isn't possible to figure out how to apply to byobu. All the while I wonder why two xterms running next to each other would ever want to be in lockstep by default?

A concrete example of what I mean. The user starts 3 xterms each running byobu with no additional parameters:

    for i in 1 2 3 ; do xterm -e byobu & ; done

Why would they want the view in each xterm to be identical, and why would they want changing the window (is that right terminology? pressing F3 and F4) in one xterm cause the other two to change in lockstep?

You probably want to do something like this:

  tmux new-session -t main -s main2

In practice it looks the same as attaching to the same session twice, except you can look at different windows at the same time.

Ok, now make byobu do that since it is how I actually use tmux. Also make sure it happens on every system I use. This gets tedious and annoying very fast. Heck mouse support not being on by default, requiring a single line in a config file on every system is already annoying enough.

The problem isn't that it is possible in theory. It is annoying in practise, unless you only have one machine and only need to do all this once in one system.