This is exactly the same reason I had in the 90s using tmux’s precursor, GNU screen. With dialup or crappy isdn, screen -R was always the first input after login

Have we gone from shitty connectivity to stable and then back to shitty?

I don't think so! But tmux is really useful for laptop scenarios, like when the laptop goes to sleep, or if you're working on a train and it goes through a tunnel with no network reception.

I still use screen, is tmux better?

By a decent measure, yes. It's screen plus modern QoL additions like multi-panels/windows/tabs and a giant pile more, and it's decades-stable so that's not like a "node framework of the week" pile of useful stuff that you'll have to rip out next month. It's very firmly established as a full screen successor.

For strictly "keep one thing running remotely" it's not much different (screen is entirely fine), but for "do work remotely" it's like comparing `cat` and `less`. One does what the other does and a heck of a lot more that is very useful when you need it. Sure, you can use grep, but having an integrated (reversible) incremental search is hard to truly replicate from the outside. Tmux is kinda on a similar level vs screen.

Personally fwiw: I almost exclusively use tmux with iterm's integration, so I don't have to learn basically any of it. I just get resumable terminal tabs and windows when I ssh anywhere, and they're still there months later when I go back. With that kind of setup it's just plain magic, a complete no-brainer, feels like what computing just obviously should be (even though it isn't). I've learned enough of the details around screen/tmux/etc to know that I'm glad to shove almost all of it over there and ignore it.

It's handy even if you just need to go from work to home to Starbucks or whatever. Doesn't have to be a poor connection as much as one that changes occasionally.

In a way - I use laptops that move around and go on/off, as well as VPNs which do the same, network-wise.

SSH fares poorly on mobile connections if you're traveling due to IPv4 roaming. Mosh solves that issue.

I use tmux, but as far as unreliable connections, I've found mosh[0] to be the best solution to the problem (when you have the ability to install it). It basically runs a background process on connection not tied to the session that your client will automatically reconnect to if the connection fails. I regularly close my laptop, travel between home and work, open it back up and the connection is available almost instantly.

[0] https://mosh.org/

Both together are even better... seamless persistence of your session across sleeps/connection lapses from mosh, and from tmux for everything else like switching client machines, a dead battery, a client's OS/terminal crashing, etc.

Absolutely. I personally prefer to use both together.

You can use shpool for this if you aren't using the other features.