Many of the purported benefits - better configuration language, more maintainable code - don't matter to me:
- Screen is done and isn't going to change. Debian has had the vertical splits patch for so long I was surprised it was a patch.
- My configuration of screen is not going to change. It's five lines that I copied and pasted 10 years ago. There's just not that much that needs to be configured.
The "Multiple Clients Sharing One Session" thing is important to me and screen gets it right by default. It's useful to have a few fixed xterms on my screen and a bunch of multiplexed terminals in screen. I use one screen session per task.
I think "screen contents persisted through full-screen programs" is screen's "altscreen on" setting. Or at least that's my note from the person whose screenrc I stole.
It doesn't. If I want to copy some text and it's in a vertical split, well... shit. Time to break out the tmux manual and see if I can figure out how to move this pane above the other one. You know what, screw it. I'll just open a new window entirely, and re-run the test there so I can copy the output.
That's how tmux handles copy/paste with vertical splits.
You mean selecting text with a mouse on a vertical split? If so get tmux upgraded to 1.8+ then prefix-z and you can temporarily zoom the window to full screen.
Your information on tmux is highly out of date.
Also prefix-alt-2 will move to horizontal layout of panes.
Thanks!
Or do the rotation thing. Or do the copy-mode thing. More than one way to skin this cat; just depends on which workflow you wish to adopt.
I too generally use tmux's built-in text-selection and clipboard when I'm copying from pane to pane, because it's more convenient.
C-b M-1 to rotate the panes back into a vertical split.
The session/window/pane/instance thing is definitely confusing and not well explained. I think it's even worse if you already have a lot of screen experience.
screen has the equivalent to sessions as well `screen -ls` will show them whereas `tmux list-sessions` will show the tmux ones. A window is composed of panes (analogy from physical windows, pane of glass). An instance is one user on a session.
Can you name one distro that doesn't include it by default? In my experience you can rely on just about every system having a core set of utilities: bash, vim, screen, ssh etc.
But if you have your own workstation and do most of the work with this workstation, tmux + customized configs might be a viable option. It just depends how good your muscle memory will keep up. :)
> doesn't this depend on whether the program calls curses endwin() function ? why does tmux/screen need to know about this ?
I just tested out of curiosity. Running vim and exiting in tmux reverts to the previous screen contents, like in raw urxvt; in screen, the previous screen contents are lost. I do not know why.
This drove me nuts until I found block select. (Option-Command drag in OSX). That pretty much eliminated that problem for me.
Granted, tmux has a better configuration language.
However the whole session/window/pane/instance model is bizarre, as evidenced by the secition "Multiple Clients Sharing One Session" under "common problems" in the linked article.
On top of that, the below are all given as points in favor of tmux, but they're either arguably better in screen or else a wash:
> Better redraw model
This is one of the (many) things that drove me back to screen. The two times I tried tmux, it had exactly this kind of issue where it would fail to redraw the screen correctly after SIGWINCH.
> screen contents persisted through full-screen programs
doesn't this depend on whether the program calls curses endwin() function ? why does tmux/screen need to know about this ?
> not possible to remove the visual bell from Screen completely
doesn't this work?
though I'm not sure why you would want to do such a thing.> automatic window renaming
last I checked this used a huge amount of cpu. is that no longer the case ? in any case, I name my windows according to what i'm doing in that window, since "bash" or "screen" (I use nested screen sessions) or "emacs" is not a useful window title.
> vertical splits
newish screen does this. I don't see the use. I figure I either have a roughly 80-column screen (default linux virtual terminals) or it's wide enough to have multiple 80-column windows (laptop or desktop running X). If I have enough horizontal space, I'm using a sensible window manager that is better-suited to real estate management.
Also how does tmux handle copy/paste with vertical splits ?
> vi key bindings in copy mode
is this supposed to be a win for tmux over screen ? both basic emacs and vi movement works out of the box in screen.